Three Essays on the Economics of Health and Higher Education in the United States

This dissertation is a collection of three essays in applied microeconomics. In the first essay, I study the enrollment effects of Tennessee Promise, a state-funded financial aid program in the two-year college sector. I document a substantial response in full-time first-time enrollment and some degree of substitutability between the unsubsidized and subsidized college sectors following the inception of the Tennessee Promise program. The second essay takes initial steps to examine the broader implications of free college. I first use institution-level data to construct three metrics of diversity, namely the share of underrepresented minorities in the student body, Simpson’s index, and Shannon’s index. I then leverage the staggered timing of statewide “free college” programs across the United States to document these programs’ impacts on college diversity. Overall, free-college programs have not catalyzed an economically significant effect on the demographic composition of public two-year colleges, although initial results do offer grounds for optimism. This essay places the first essay in perspective. In relation to the literature, the findings complement recent work, which has documented the early success of promise programs in encouraging community college enrollment. To this end, I provide several policy implications to improve practice.

The third essay is a joint work in which my coauthor and I seek to understand US immigrants’ health-related behaviors and outcomes. We simultaneously examine risky consumption choices (smoking and drinking) and physical health conditions (asthma, diabetes, vision problems, and coronary heart diseases) using data from the National Health Interview Surveys (1989-2018). We incorporate cohort fixed-effects and the interactions between cohort effects and years since immigration into our empirical framework to capture the dynamics of immigrant health over time. For all health indicators, we find that there are important differences between arriving immigrants and natives. Despite some heterogeneity in the dynamics of unhealthy behaviors, this heterogeneity seems to dissipate as we explore longer-term health outcomes. Overall, our findings provide an interesting outlook on how the integration into the host society affects American immigrants’ health. We contribute new results to the immigrant assimilation literature, which has primarily focused on obesity and wages.