Essays in policy evaluation and labor economics

Abstract

This dissertation contains three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the effect of a gun control act in California. State legislators in the U.S. are striving to curb gun violence. A common approach is to extend the existing firearms ban list. This paper examines the effect of legislation restricting sales of selected firearms in California using the synthetic control method. This case study method forms a synthetic unit using a linear combination of other states in the U.S. as the control group. The results show substantial increases in firearm sales in California from the point of passage until the law becomes effective. After the surge ends when the law becomes effective, the sale of firearms is only moderately affected thereafter. This paper also creates robustness checks to confirm that the synthetic control method is working properly with low firearm density in California, which calls into question some of the assumptions underlying the synthetic control method. The Difference-in-Difference regression reaches the same conclusion. The second chapter focuses on immigrant assimilation in the U.S. Assimilation is the process in which immigrants improve earnings as they become more adapted to the host country society. Cross-sectional studies show that immigrants have lower earnings upon arrival and faster earnings growth compared to natives. Longitudinal studies conclude that estimates based on cross-sectional data are positively biased due to decreasing cohort quality and negatively selected outmigration. I reproduce such estimates with recent U.S. data. The estimates would appear to show "bias," as inclusion of cohort fixed effects alter estimates. However, in contrast to expectations based on the current literature, decreasing cohort quality and outmigration do not explain the difference. Next, I apply a non-parametric method to make the wage distributions visually comparable across cohorts and time. I find that the linear specification of assimilation is misleading. Finally, I revisit the classic model with a quadratic assimilation term and expand it to explore the assimilation process's heterogeneity. I find that the "bias" disappears with a quadratic assimilation effect. The assimilation effect is sensitive to age at arrival and country of origin. The third chapter considers an unexplained puzzle in one of the most widely used public datasets in the U.S. The American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the Decennial Census as the primary data source for identifying immigrants' socioeconomic characteristics. This paper focuses on cohort analysis, in which a cohort combines immigrants arriving in a given year from surveys in multiple years. Tracking the sizes of cohorts from 2006 to 2019 using the ACS, we observe an abnormal increase in cohort size in the 10th and 20th years since arrival. Two hypotheses are tested, population estimate structural break and the renewal of green card. Neither appears to explain the puzzle.