Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Economics

Advisor

Frank W. Heiland

Committee Members

Michael Grossman

Theodore Joyce

Henry Saffer

Kevin Shih

Subject Categories

Education Policy | Health Economics | Health Policy | Labor Economics | Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation

Keywords

electronic cigarette taxation, tobacco regulation, biomarkers, immigration and education, school finance, difference-in-differences

Abstract

This dissertation consists of two essays in applied microeconomics, each examining how individuals and institutions respond to policy changes. Both essays leverage natural experiments and recent advances in difference-in-differences estimation to identify causal effects. Both also speak to a common theme in public policy: the gap between intended and actual consequences of government intervention, and the role that policy design plays in shaping those consequences.

The first essay examines the impact of state-level e-cigarette excise taxes on nicotine and tobacco exposure among adults aged 18 and older. A central contribution is its use of individual-level panel biomarker data from urine samples collected in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, which provides objective, biochemical measures of exposure that are free from self-reporting bias. Nicotine exposure is measured through urinary cotinine, which captures consumption from any source, while tobacco-specific exposure is measured through urinary NNAL, which reflects exposure to tobacco products but not e-cigarettes. Leveraging the staggered adoption of e-cigarette taxes across U.S. states between 2013 and 2019 and implementing the doubly robust difference-in-differences estimator of Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021), I find that taxation leads to a significant increase in tobacco-specific exposure while overall nicotine exposure remains largely unchanged. These results suggest that taxed e-cigarette users substitute toward combustible tobacco products rather than reducing their overall nicotine consumption. The essay also documents that misrepresentation of tobacco and e-cigarette use in self-reported survey data is substantial, ranging from 5 to 10 percent depending on the product category, reinforcing the value of biomarker-based outcomes for designing and evaluating tobacco policy.

The second essay, coauthored with Kevin Shih, examines the impact of the Texas busing program on New York City (NYC) public schools. Beginning in April 2022, the Governor of Texas initiated a program to transport asylum seekers arriving at the southern border to sanctuary cities, including NYC. Since then, NYC has received more than 200,000 asylum seekers, many of them families with young children, who were placed in homeless shelters and subsequently enrolled in nearby public elementary schools. Exploiting variation in baseline family homeless shelter capacity across school zones as a source of quasi-random variation in migrant exposure, and implementing a difference-in-differences design that compares schools within the same neighborhood, we find that exposed schools experienced significant increases in migrant students, proxied by English Language Learners, Hispanic students, and students in temporary housing, but that domestic students did not experience adverse effects on enrollment, test scores, attendance, or chronic absenteeism. We further document that progressive funding policies buffered schools against resource crowding by expanding English language instruction to accommodate newcomers, leaving pupil-teacher ratios unchanged. This essay speaks more broadly to the role that progressive school finance systems play in shaping the consequences of sudden immigration inflows.

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