Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation (Campus Access)

Degree Type

PhD

College

Chambers College of Business and Economics

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Daniel Grossman

Committee Member

Bryan McCannon

Committee Member

Nathaniel Burke

Committee Member

Alicia Plemmons

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on how various health and education policies affect people’s well-being. The first chapter focuses on how in-person schooling impacts reports of child maltreatment (child abuse and neglect). The study uses pandemic school closures to study the consequences of a loss of a major source of mandatory reporters: education personnel. Exploiting variation in school closures, I find pandemic school closures reduced child maltreatment reports by about 20 percent. This result is driven by a reduction in both substantiated and unsubstantiated reports. The effect is consistent across maltreatment types. I find reports from education personnel do not crowd out reports from non-education personnel and lower-income counties experience a disproportionate decline in reports. These findings suggest many cases of child maltreatment go undetected when children do not attend school in-person. The second chapter focuses on the impact of school closures on food hardship. Food insecurity is linked to a variety of adverse health outcomes, and free-or-reduced price school meals have been shown to reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. One potential cost of school closures is that otherwise food insecure children no longer receive these meals, resulting in an increase in food insecurity. While many papers suggest school closures should increase food insecurity, I am the first to formally exploit variation in school closures to determine if school closures do result in an increase in food insufficiency and insecurity. In doing so, I also evaluate the effectiveness of alternatives to in-person school meals. I exploit 2020-21 variation in school closures from the pandemic to examine the impact of school closures on food hardship. Using data from the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement and the Census Bureau’s Household PULSE survey, I find school closures increase the probability a household is food insufficient by about 15 percent. This effect is primarily driven by those eligible to receive free-or-reduced price meals. This result appears to be driven by a reduction in food assistance from the child’s school despite alternatives to in-person school meals such as pick-up meals and pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer cards. These results show alternatives to in-person school meals are insufficient substitutes, resulting in an increase in food insecurity from school closures and highlighting one of the many unintended consequences of school closures. The third chapter focuses on higher education policy, coauthored with Bryan McCannon and Marisa Cameron. We ask whether Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation has a meaningful impact on higher education admissions. To do this, we use the Synthetic control Method to explore 19 U.S. institutions which first achieved this certification recently. We find no impact of the accreditation on demand for a university overall, but find some evidence suggesting the accreditation may increase graduate business enrollment

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