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Essays on Economics of Education and Social Policy
Abramishvili, Zurab ; Gaule, Patrick (advisor) ; Rivkin, Steven (referee) ; Patrinos, Harry Anthony (referee)
In the first chapter of the dissertation, two administrative datasets from the Targeted Social Assistance Program (unconditional cash transfer) and National Assessment and Examination Center in Georgia are merged in order to investigate the impact of an unconditional cash transfer on the university enrollment rate in Georgia. Given that the program recipients were selected by virtue of being below a certain quantitative poverty threshold, this feature of the program is exploited to implement a global regression discontinuity. The study finds a positive impact of cash transfers on enrollment in tertiary education. Specifically, being a recipient of the social assistance program significantly increases a student's likelihood of enrollment, by 6.3%. More importantly, the findings suggest that the observed effect is gender specific: the impact is stronger for males. Male children of a beneficiary family have a 13.4% greater chance of being admitted to university. This marks the first attempt to study such a program in the context of education. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the long-run effects of cash transfers. In the second chapter, the impact on a broad range of outcomes of the same social assistance program in Georgia is examined. An original household survey was developed and...
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Essays on the Economics of Education
Todua, Gega ; Jeong, Byeongju (advisor) ; Patrinos, Harry Anthony (referee) ; Veramendi, Gregory (referee)
In the first chapter, we study financial aid policies in developing countries that sup- port students' education abroad. We collect a unique data-set on government-funded scholarship and loan programs and establish stylized facts for developing countries. We find that scholarship programs select students based on merit criteria, target grad- uate and postgraduate studies, and require recipients to return after graduation more frequently than loan programs do. We build a two-country student migration model that qualitatively accounts for the observed patterns. In the model, government inter- vention is justified for two reasons. First, students from a developing country are as- sumed to be financially constrained and cannot afford education abroad. Second, the government values the productivity of "returnees" more highly than the market does. We argue that when students are uncertain about their future productivity and may fail in their studies, scholarship programs can insure them against potential default. Consequently, if students differ in their expected ability, under certain conditions, a government with a tight budget will prioritize ex-ante high-ability students and sup- port them with scholarships with return requirement, and support ex-ante low-ability students with loans without return...
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Essays on Economics of Education and Social Policy
Abramishvili, Zurab ; Gaule, Patrick (advisor) ; Rivkin, Steven (referee) ; Patrinos, Harry Anthony (referee)
In the first chapter of the dissertation, two administrative datasets from the Targeted Social Assistance Program (unconditional cash transfer) and National Assessment and Examination Center in Georgia are merged in order to investigate the impact of an unconditional cash transfer on the university enrollment rate in Georgia. Given that the program recipients were selected by virtue of being below a certain quantitative poverty threshold, this feature of the program is exploited to implement a global regression discontinuity. The study finds a positive impact of cash transfers on enrollment in tertiary education. Specifically, being a recipient of the social assistance program significantly increases a student's likelihood of enrollment, by 6.3%. More importantly, the findings suggest that the observed effect is gender specific: the impact is stronger for males. Male children of a beneficiary family have a 13.4% greater chance of being admitted to university. This marks the first attempt to study such a program in the context of education. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the long-run effects of cash transfers. In the second chapter, the impact on a broad range of outcomes of the same social assistance program in Georgia is examined. An original household survey was developed and...
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