Essays on the effects of law and policy on the educational attainment and employment of particular societal groups

In the first paper, I examine the Vocational Rehabilitation Program, which provides rehabilitation and job placement assistance to individuals with disabilities through state-level Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) agencies. This paper is the first effort to systematically answer the question of whether increasing funding for the VR Program would improve closure outcomes at the margin. In brief, I find that increased spending on an individual keeps the person in the system longer, increasing the probability that her needs will be evaluated and that she will receive services, but does not increase the likelihood of her attaining a competitive employment outcome or, on average, having higher earnings. In the second paper, Daniel Chen and I examine the effects of sexual harassment law on gender inequality. Economic theory, at first glance, suggests that the potential effects of forbidding sexual harassment may be similar to those of other employment mandates. If a compensating differential for harassment exists, wages for women who took jobs with harassment when it was legal should fall when harassment is illegal. We identify the impact of court made sexual harassment law on gender inequality by using the fact that federal judges are randomly assigned to appellate cases along with the fact that female judges and Democratic appointees decide sexual harassment cases differently than do male judges and Republican appointees. Sexual harassment law appears to have a positive effect on female wages and employment outcomes though it reduces the probability of full-time employment of females relative to males. A question of significance for the future direction of social policy is to what extent does current policy make family background a less important determinant of an individual's socioeconomic status. In the third paper, I systematically test for differential impacts of state policies on college enrollment and four-year college completion along several dimensions of family background. I find little evidence that state policies have a statistically different impact on groups that vary along the dimensions of income and race. The most consistent differential effects are found along the dimension of parental education.