2026 Theses Doctoral

Three Essays on the Economics of Public Investments in Education

Kramer, Erin M.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of investments in public education. Each chapter employs difference-in-differences methods to identify causal effects of policy changes on public education.

Chapter 1 evaluates Georgia’s universal Pre-K program using novel provider-level data and a staggered difference-in-differences design. The analysis finds no evidence of statewide average effects on short- and medium-run outcomes including standardized test scores, grade retention, and high school graduation, with limited evidence of heterogeneous effects by urbanicity.

Chapter 2, co-authored with Dr. Andrew Samwick, examines how the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s cap on the state and local tax deduction affected public school finance. We matching IRS Statistics of Income data to Census school finance records and use a continuous difference-in-differences design in which we control for a linear pre-trend in the treatment-outcome relationship. We find that a one standard deviation reduction in SALT deductibility predicts declines of approx- imately 3 percent in per-pupil revenues and 1 percent in non-capital expenditures, with implied elasticities of 1.39 for total revenues and 2.11 for local revenues.

Chapter 3 evaluates Ohio’s Choose Ohio First scholarship using administrative data linking postsecondary enrollment to unemployment insurance wage records. Exploiting the program’s staggered rollout, the analysis finds that scholarship eligibility significantly increased STEM degree production. Effects are concentrated in the fields of Engineering, Biological Sciences, and Computer Science. At two-year institutions, degree production effects are null but transfer rates increase significantly.