Dissertation Defense: Carolina Concha-Arriagada
Candidate: Carolina Concha-Arriagada
Major: Economics
Advisors: Garance Genicot, Ph.D. and Laurent Bouton Ph.D.
Title: Essays in Education, Mobility, and Political Economy
In this dissertation, I apply theoretical and empirical analysis to three topics ranging from the economics of education, mobility, and political economy, mainly focusing on agents’ decisions and the effects of those decisions in aggregate. In the first chapter, Should I Stay or Should I Go? Strategic Responses to Improve College Admission Chances, I study whether policies aimed at increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups enrolled in college can result in strategic responses by high school students. Relying on a policy change in Chile, I use detailed administrative data and a simple theoretical model to show that high school students react to these sorts of college admission policies by switching schools, undermining the policy effects.
In the second chapter, Upward Mobility in Developing Countries — co-authored with Garance Genicot and Debraj Ray—, we provide an overview of the literature on mobility in developing countries. We note that the scarcity of panel data has hindered the measurement of mobility for many countries. We pay particular attention to the recent development of panel-free mobility measures, which allows us to measure upward mobility in 147 countries. We use these measures to revisit some central themes in the literature focused on determinants of mobility.
In the third chapter, It’s Always Sunny in Politics—co-authored with JJ Naddeo—, we study how election day weather impacts voter choice. Specifically, we study an understudied dimension of weather—sunshine. We document how sunshine affects the decision-making of voters in US presidential elections. We find that election-day exposure to sunshine increases support for the Democratic party on average. Additionally, we show that, contrary to prior findings that do not control for sunshine, precipitation has no detectable impact on partisan support but universally depresses turnout. To rationalize our results, we propose a mechanism whereby sunshine modulates voter mood, which causes a change in voter choice, while precipitation only impacts turnout by increasing the cost of voting. We then build a theoretical model, which features this mechanism, and generate additional tests that we take to our data. Our results suggest that uninformative weather on election day, specifically sunshine, have detectable electoral impacts that teach us about voter choice.
Index words: Economics of Education, Mobility, Political Economy, Applied Microeconomics, Strategic Behavior, Inequality, Turnout, Voter Behavior