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Using a dataset of ASU students from the 2016-2017 cohort, we interact gender and parent education level to observe gaps in academic achievement. We see a statistically insignificant achievement gap for males across parent education level, but a statistically significant achievement gap for females across parent education level. We also observe dropout gaps among these interaction groups. We see the widest dropout gap being between males across parent education level, with the smallest dropout gap being between females across parent education level. So with males we see an insignificant achievement gap but the widest dropout gap across parent education level, and with females we see a significant achievement gap but the smallest dropout gap across parent education level. What is driving these gaps and causing more similarly performing students to drop out at wider rates? At the aggregate level, we see larger gaps in grade- associated dropout probability across parent education level for males which may be able to explain the larger difference in overall proportions of dropouts between males. However, when predicting dropout probability of the semester with the most first generation and non-first generation dropouts, we see that females have the largest differences across parent education level in grade-associated dropout probability. This suggests that our model may be best suited in using college achievement data to predict overall dropout probabilities, not next-semester dropout probabilities using current semester data. Our findings also suggest that first generation students’ dropout probability is more sensitive to the grades they receive than non-first generation students.
In chapter one, using a rich dataset for the United States, I estimate a series of models to document the birth order effects on cognitive outcomes, non-cognitive outcomes, and parental investments. I estimate a model that allows for heterogeneous birth order effects by unobservables to examine how birth order effects varies across households. I find that first-born children score 0.2 of a standard deviation higher on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes than their later-born siblings. They also receive 10\% more in parental time, which accounts for more than half of the differences in outcomes. I document that birth order effects vary between 0.1 and 0.4 of a standard deviation across households with the effects being smaller in households with certain characteristics such as a high income.
In chapter two, I build a model of intra-household resource allocation that endogenously generates the decreasing birth order effects in household income with the aim of using the model for counterfactual policy experiments. The model has a life-cycle framework in which a household with two children confronts a sequence of time constraints and a lifetime monetary constraint, and divides the available time and monetary resources between consumption and investment. The counterfactual experiment shows that an annual income transfer of 10,000 USD to low-income households decreases the birth order effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills by one-sixth, which is five times bigger than the effect in high-income household.
In chapter three, with Francesco Agostinelli and Matthew Wiswall, we examine the relative importance of investments at home and at school during an important transition for many children, entering formal schooling at kindergarten. Moreover, our framework allows for complementarities between children's skills and investments from schools. We find that investments from schools are an important determinant of children's skills at the end of kindergarten, whereas parental investments, although strongly correlated with end-of-kindergarten outcomes, have smaller effects. In addition, we document a negative complementarity between children's skills at kindergarten entry and investments from schools, implying that low-skill children benefit the most from an increase in the quality of schools.