Three essays on the economics of education Zach Weingarten

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Weingarten, Zach, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Economics., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education.

Developmental psychology.

0501.

0510.

0515.

0620.

0511.

Local Subjects:

Education.

Developmental psychology.

0501.

0510.

0515.

0620.

0511.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (263 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12B

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation contains three chapters on the economics of education, studying how admissions rules shape student sorting and welfare in school choice, how genetic endowments and parental investments jointly determine child development, and how information frictions drive teacher turnover in early-career labor markets. The first paper, titled "Designing Optimal School Choice Admissions Policies: Insights from a Lottery-Based Reform'' and joint with Sherrie Cheng, studies how to design selective-school admissions policies that expand access to underrepresented students while accounting for strategic application behavior from students, the formation of endogenous peer composition, and the resulting equity-efficiency trade-offs. Many public school districts changed admissions criteria for magnet and other selective schools to expand access to underrepresented groups. Such reforms can also change students' application and enrollment choices, with downstream effects on school-level test score value-added, peer composition, and student-school match quality. This paper considers how to best design admissions rules to balance equity and efficiency trade-offs when students respond strategically and peer effects are endogenous. We study a natural experiment in Toronto, where achievement-based admissions to high school magnet programs were replaced with a centralized lottery that included race and gender quotas. We use an instrumental variables strategy based on randomized offers to identify the causal effects of magnet admission and exploit the policy's rollout to estimate its impact on district-wide student sorting, peer composition, and school-level value-added. We then develop and estimate an equilibrium school choice model with strategic application choices, peer effects that affect both the demand for schools and their value-added, and admissions decisions under both policies. In counterfactual policy experiments, we find that the reform raised average student welfare but generated large losses for students who would have been admitted under the original policy. In addition, the reform reduced segregation at the expense of match quality. This equity-efficiency trade-off persists even when either of the two studied Toronto policies are re-optimized to maximize efficiency. We show that strategy-proof, two-sided stable mechanisms based on Deferred Acceptance deliver the highest match quality among the policies considered and improve equity relative to the baseline. The second paper, titled "Modeling and Measuring the Genetic Determinants of Child Development'' and joint with Francesco Agostinelli, studies how to measure children's latent genetic endowments in a way that separates direct genetic effects from environmentally mediated influences, and how these endowments interact dynamically with parental investments to shape skill formation. The longstanding debate over whether human capabilities and skills are shaped more by "nature" or "nurture" has been revitalized by recent advances in genetics, particularly in the use of polygenic scores (PGSs) to proxy for genetic endowments. Yet, we argue that PGSs embed not only direct genetic effects but also indirect environmental influences, raising questions about their validity for causal analysis. We show that these conflated measures can mislead studies of gene-environment interactions, especially when parental behavior responds to children's genetic risk. To address this issue, we construct a new latent measure of genetic risk that integrates individual genotypes with diagnostic symptoms, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health linked to restricted individual SNP-level genotypes from dbGaP. Exploiting multiple sources of variation-including the Mendelian within-family genetic randomization among siblings-we find consistent evidence that parents compensate by investing more in children with higher genetic risk for ADHD. Strikingly, these compensatory responses disappear when genetic risk is proxied by the conventional ADHD PGS, which also yields weaker-and in some cases reversed-predictions for long-run outcomes. Finally, we embed our latent measure of genetic endowments into a standard dynamic structural model of child development. The model shows that both parental investments and latent genetic risk jointly shape children's cognitive and mental health development, underscoring the importance of modeling the dynamic interplay between genes and environments in the formation of human capital. The third paper, titled "Information Frictions and Teacher Turnover'' and joint with Kristen Shure, studies how non-pecuniary information frictions contribute to instability and turnover in the market for novice teachers, and evaluates policies that improve match quality by improving information rather than pay. Many decentralized matching markets experience high rates of instability due to information frictions. This paper analyzes these frictions in a particularly unstable U.S. market, the labor market for first-year school teachers. We develop and estimate a dynamic, partial equilibrium model of labor mobility that incorporates non-pecuniary information frictions for school climate and teacher workload. In terms of reducing turnover, a policy that improves information outperforms each alternative considered, including targeted wage premiums at hard-to-staff schools, large retention bonuses, and relaxed tenure requirements. Replicating the gains made through information revelation requires retention bonuses valued at 45% of teachers' current salaries

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: B.

Advisors: Todd, Petra Committee members: Agostinelli, Francesco; Luflade, Margaux

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798247972792

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license