Three essays on econometrics and economics of education.

Abstract

This dissertation is a collection of three independent essays on econometrics and economics of education. The first chapter investigates how the Research Excellence Framework (REF) perceives the quality of economics journals. Exploiting aggregate information available in the published REF dataset, we propose a novel algorithm within an ordered probit framework that provides an effective recovery of underlying disaggregated outcomes (i.e. individual submission). The estimated results can be viewed as a directory for predicting the perception of journal quality for the REF 2014 exercise. In the second chapter, I suggest a new matching methodology—the Dirichlet process (DP) matching—that has several important advantages compared to conventional matching methods, including the balancing property, a more efficient ATT estimator and a credible confidence band. I describe the DP matching as a story of the “Chinese restaurant with invited guests”. In the third chapter, we exploit a quasi-natural experiment, namely the PelCa program in Ecuador, and study its consequences on mothers’ empowerment and children’s early development. We find optimistic evidence that the program helped mothers rear their children in a more learning conductive environment, resulting in positive effects on children outcomes and greater empowerment in mothers at home and in the community