Title: Essays in Education and Crime in Colombia

Abstract: This dissertation contains three essays in applied microeconomics. In the first chapter paper I test whether the return to college education is the result of human capital accumulation or instead reflects the fact that attending college signals higher ability to employers.  The second chapter provides evidence that parental incarceration increases children’s educational attainment. Finally, in the third chapter I derive a new expression that extends the Local Average Treatment Effect concept, to a setting with two sources of unobserved treatment heterogeneity.