Chapter 1: "The Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Child Achievement and Long-Term Educational Attainment." The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a significant source of government assistance to low income families. Total outlay reached over $50 billion in 2008, with more than 97 percent of aid received by families with children (Internal Revenue Service 2011). Despite its size and pro-child goals, relatively little is known about how the EITC affects children directly. This study directly links EITC receipt throughout all ages of childhood to both contemporaneous achievement and long-run educational attainment. I take advantage of both Federal tax code changes and state EITC adoptions, which result in large variation in EITC generosity across state, time, and family size. Using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that EITC expansions improve both contemporaneous and long-run educational outcomes of children. An increase in the maximum EITC of $1,000 (2008 dollars) in a given year significantly increases math achievement by about 0.072 nationally normed standard deviations. This change in EITC generosity during childhood also increases the probability of graduating high school or receiving a GED at age 19 by about 2.1 percentage points and increases the probability of completing one or more years of college by age 19 by about 1.4 percentage points. Estimated effects are larger for boys and minority children, and I find evidence that an expansion in the EITC is more effective at improving educational outcomes for children who are younger during the expansion.Chapter 2: "The Effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit on Net Family Financial Resources." This study is the first of my knowledge to examine the effects of EITC expansions on a comprehensive measure of total net family income as well as the various income sources that comprise this measure. Using the Current Population Survey, I find an increase in labor force participation of about 1.7 percentage points and a 1.3 percentage point decline in the poverty rate following a relative increase in the maximum EITC of about $1,900 (2008 dollars) for low income families. This EITC expansion also increases relative earnings by about $471, increases EITC payments by about $742, and increases total net family income by about $527. I also find larger impacts for single mothers and minority families, suggesting that the program is well-targeted at the most disadvantaged families.Chapter 3: "An Evaluation of Empirical Bayes' Estimation of Value-Added Teacher Performance Measures." Empirical Bayes' (EB) estimation is a widely used procedure to calculate teacher value-added. It is primarily viewed as a way to make imprecise estimates more reliable. In this paper, we review the theory of EB estimation and use simulated data to study its ability to properly rank teachers. We compare the performance of EB estimators with that of other widely used value-added estimators under different teacher assignment scenarios. We find that, although EB estimators generally perform well under random assignment of teachers to classrooms, their performance generally suffers under non-random teacher assignment. Under non-random assignment, estimators that explicitly (if imperfectly) control for the teacher assignment mechanism perform the best out of all the estimators we examine. We also find that shrinking the estimates, as in EB estimation, does not itself substantially boost performance.
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