| My dissertation consists of three parts. The first part is a complete paper on the higher education and subsequent unemployment of undocumented immigrants. In this paper, I measure the effect of a policy change in Texas that made undocumented immigrants eligible for in-state tuition and financial aid at Texas' public colleges and universities on education and employment outcomes. In the second part, I introduce a paper on affirmative action, racial composition and academic performance. In this paper, I measure the effect of racial composition on probability of graduation from college in the context of an affirmative action ban in California. In the third part, I introduce a paper on racial peer effects in the classroom. In this paper, I use data from a randomized experiment, the STAR experiment, to test for the presence of racial peer effects. That is, I measure the effect of having one additional white or black student in the classroom on the rest of the classroom's standardized test performance. |
