Essays on the Effects of Education Policy and Tax Policy on Labor Market and Other Outcomes

This dissertation is composed of three essays. First chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Education on Economic and Social Assimilation: Evidence from California’s Proposition 227. Bilingual education is one of the main educational programs schools in the U.S. use to help limited English proficient students, yet very little evidence exists about the causal impacts of bilingual education on adulthood outcomes. I use a triple-differences strategy, in which I compare the outcomes of foreign-born Hispanics to US-born Hispanics who attended elementary school before and after the policy change in California, and address the potential issue of differential cohort trend between foreign-born and US-born using Hispanics from Texas. This paper exploits the 1998 ban on bilingual education in California to identify the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on the social and labor market outcomes of young adults. Second chapter. The Impact of Bilingual Education on Long-run Outcomes: Evidence from Arizona’s Proposition 203. In this chapter, I investigate the causal impact of exposure to bilingual education on different outcomes of young adults exploiting the ban on bilingual education in Arizona resulting from a voter referendum in 2000. Third chapter. The Effects of Marginal Tax Rate on Self-employment Entry. This chapter investigates the effects of marginal tax rates on the decision to become self-employed.