Chapter 1: International Peers in Higher Education and Domestic Students' Outcomes.Recent decades witnessed a rapid increase in foreign post-secondary student enrollment in the US, substantially altering the college landscape. While evidence suggests that foreign students contribute significantly to university revenues and the host economy, there remains much debate around their impact on domestic students' outcomes. Using rich administrative and survey data from a large US public university, this paper explores the effects of exposure to foreign peers in college courses on domestic students' academic outcomes. I focus on first-term introductory math courses and leverage plausibly exogenous variation in the share of foreign peers across terms but within a course-instructor pair. I find that exposure to foreign peers in lower-level (non-calculus) courses has a sizable negative effect on the graduation rate of domestic students; students in higher-level (calculus-based) courses are unaffected by their foreign peers. The decline in graduation comes through a drop in students graduating with non-STEM degrees, with no effect on the number of STEM graduates. Further, the negative effects are incurred by domestic students of all races except Asians; domestic Asian students incur positive effects. Exploring potential mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence of limited interaction, lack of shared interests or culture, and language barriers between domestic and foreign students. Additionally, evidence points to the potential role of domestic students' lower academic rank in their peer group. At the same time, I do not find evidence of negative social preferences associated with races or immigrants among domestic students, nor do I find evidence linking the effect to differences in abilities between domestic and foreign students.Chapter 2: The Local Economic Impacts of Foreign Students.Do foreign students affect the economic outcomes of the natives in places with post-secondary institutions? I address this question by examining the impacts of demand shocks induced by expansions in foreign post-secondary student enrollment in the US between 2004 and 2016. Using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits spatial variation in foreign student enrollment expansion over this period, I estimate the causal effects on a vector of local economic outcomes. On average, the demand shocks substantially increased local employment and wages while having no significant effect on housing rent. At the same time, I find no evidence of adverse spillover effects on neighboring areas without post-secondary institutions. Further, the effect on employment increases with population density. However, the effect on housing rent also increases, likely due to limited supply in densely populated areas. The results suggest welfare gains for natives, especially in less densely populated areas that depend heavily on the education sector. While the effect of changes in foreign student enrollment on the local economy is sizable, the effect of changes in domestic student enrollment is small during the same period.Chapter 3: Science Education and Labor Market Outcomes in a Developing Economy (with Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, Nishith Prakash, and Tarun Jain).We examine the association between studying science in higher secondary school and labor market earnings in India. Studying science in high school is associated with 22\% greater earnings than studying business or humanities. Earnings for science students are further enhanced with some fluency in English. Science education is also associated with more years of education, completing a professional degree, returns to entrepreneurship and working in public sector positions. Primary survey of high school students shows no discernible differences in behavioral characteristics of science students compared to others.
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