Essays on the impacts of educational policies

The first chapter evaluates whether test score gains in schools threatened by accountability sanctions primarily stem from educational reforms or from manipulative school behavior. Using data from Florida, I find that attending a threatened elementary school has a positive effect on students' math scores at least through the first one to two years of middle school. Expenditure data reveals that sanction threats raise school spending on instructional equipment, curricular development, and teacher training. These findings are consistent with the presence of reforms induced by accountability pressure. The second chapter estimates the effects of federal education grants on school district expenditures. The implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which triggered increases in federal education funding and altered the formulas by which funds were allocated to school districts, serves as the source of exogenous variation in federal grants. I find that NCLB-induced increases in federal grants raised district expenditures by approximately the same amount, and these expenditure changes were fully sustained three to four years after NCLB implementation. The third chapter examines the effects of children's time in public school on maternal labor supply. I exploit the fact that children from consecutive age groups experience differential increases in schooling time from the summer to the school year while their mothers should not otherwise differ in seasonal patterns of labor supply. I find that provision of full-day public schooling to five-year-olds and six-year-olds generates a 3 to 10 percentage point rise in the proportion of mothers who work.