UCLA

I study three separate questions in this dissertation. In Chapter 1, I examine how information frictions between parents and their children affect human capital investment, and how much reducing those friction can improve student effort and achievement. I find that providing additional information to parents regarding missing assignments is a potentially cost-effective strategy to increase parental investments and improve student achievement. In Chapter 2, we measure the impact of high-quality charter schools on teen fertility using admission lotteries to several Los Angeles charter schools as a natural experiment. We find evidence that admission to high-quality charter schools can substantially reduce teen pregnancies. In Chapter 3, we semi-parametrically estimate teacher effects on student test scores using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District. We document that there is significantly more within-teacher variation in teachers' effects than across teacher variation. We find that interacting the teacher indicator variables with a function of the students' lagged test scores captures most of the nonlinearities, preserves the heterogeneity of teacher effects, and provides more accurate estimates.