UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation uses reduced-form techniques to causally answer questions of direct importance in the fields of public policy broadly, but more specifically in the areas of health economics, labor economics, and education. The first chapter examines the effectiveness of Ohio's "Vax-a-Million" vaccination campaign -- a state-funded program that offered entry to a cash lottery for getting (or having already received) the vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus. We used an improvement upon the synthetic control method, which allowed us to generate a ``Synthetic Ohio'' which we could use as an untreated counterfactual. Using public health data, we find that the lottery was effective not only in boosting vaccination rates, but in also reducing COVID cases and ICU utilization. Finally, using an estimate of the high costs of ICU occupancy, we perform a back of the envelope cost-benefit analysis and find that the lottery had a benefit cost ratio of at least 10:1, saving the state of Ohio over 60 million dollars.

The second and third chapters explore teacher labor supply responses to the recent, rapid adoption of a radical change in the traditional school schedule -- going from five days a week to four -- in K-12 education observed throughout the country. While this policy has been adopted by 26 U.S. states, I focus my efforts on Oklahoma -- a state that has seen more than 20 percent of its districts make the scheduling change since 2010 -- and use publicly-available employment records from the Oklahoma State Department of Education to examine the effect that this schedule change had on teacher retention and quality.

In the second chapter, I investigate the impact that this schedule change had on schools' ability to recruit quality teachers and to retain current (and new) faculty. Since the policy had a staggered rollout, I use an event study design to align schools in event time. I find that adoption of the policy is associated with higher retention of new teachers with zero prior experience, increased recruitment of teachers with prior experience, and a reduction in the need for emergency certifications for teachers, which serves as a proxy for improved teaching quality.

In the third chapter, I describe the labor market for Oklahoma public schoolteachers and analyze the career trajectory of teachers who are early in their careers and new at their school, some of whom are exposed to, or have selected into, the four-day schedule change. I model their tenure using a duration (or hazard/survival) model and find confirmatory evidence that the four-day week substantially improves retention.