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Working Paper
School choice through relocation: evidence from the Washington, D.C. area
In this paper I show how the monetary value that parents place on school quality may be inferred from their choice of residential location. The method identifies the valuation that parents place on school quality from the differential effect that measures of school quality have on the residential choices of households with and without children. I implement the method with data from the U.S. Census for Washington, D.C. using residential location decisions in 1990. For whites I find that school quality is an important determinant of residential choices and that households with children in the ...
Working Paper
Paying for performance: the education impacts of a community college scholarship program for low-income adults
We evaluate educational outcomes from an experiment which randomly assigned performancebased scholarship eligibility to students on community college campuses. Scholarships were awarded in three payments each semester over the course of two semesters. Payments were tied to students meeting two conditions?enrolling at least half time and maintaining a ?C? or better semester grade point average. We find that the program increased the likelihood a student was enrolled at the program institutions in both the first and second semesters after random assignment and increased the total number of ...
Working Paper
The Pathway to Enrolling in a High-Performance High School: Understanding Barriers to Access
In 2017, Chicago Public Schools adopted an online universal application system for all high schools with the hope of providing more equitable access to high-performance schools. Despite the new system, Black students and students living in low-socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods remained less likely than their peers to enroll in a high-performance high school. In this paper, we characterize various constraints that students and families may face in enrolling in a high-performance high school including eligibility to programs based on prior academic achievement, distance from ...
Working Paper
Financial incentives and educational investment: the impact of performance-based scholarships on student time use
Using survey data from a field experiment in the U.S., we test whether and how financial incentives change student behavior. We find that providing post-secondary scholarships with incentives to meet performance, enrollment, and/or attendance benchmarks induced students to devote more time to educational activities and to increase the quality of effort toward, and engagement with, their studies; students also allocated less time to other activities such as work and leisure. While the incentives did not generate impacts after eligibility had ended, they also did not decrease students? inherent ...
Working Paper
Teachers and student achievement in the Chicago public high schools
We match administrative data on Chicago public high school students and teachers at the classroom level to estimate the importance of teachers to mathematics test score gains. We show that sampling variation and other measurement issues are important drivers of nave estimates of teacher effects, in some cases accounting for the majority of dispersion in teacher quality. However, correcting for these problems, teachers are still economically and statistically influential. Replacing a teacher with another that is rated two standard deviations superior in quality can add 0.35 to 0.45 grade ...
Working Paper
The Role of Selective High Schools in Equalizing Educational Outcomes: Heterogeneous Effects by Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status
We investigate whether elite Chicago public high schools can help close the achievement gap between high-achieving students from more and less affluent neighborhoods. Seats are allocated based on prior achievement with 70 percent reserved for high-achieving applicants from four neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) categories. Using regression discontinuity design, we find no effect on test scores or college attendance for students from high- or low-SES neighborhoods and positive effects on student reports of their experiences. For students from low-SES neighborhoods, we estimate ...
Working Paper
The Expanding Landscape of Online Education: Who Engages and How They Fare
Online offerings at traditional brick-and-mortar universities have become common, though some question if online courses can adequately substitute for thein-person college experience. We explore changes in undergraduate online course enrollment at a large, public 4-year system and the impacts of online courses onstudent outcomes. Online enrollment in courses nearly doubled from 2012 to 2019 when almost 40 percent took at least one class online. Female students and older students were especially likely to take online classes. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that GPAs are ...
Working Paper
Not working: demographic changes, policy changes, and the distribution of weeks (not) worked
From 1978 to 2000 the fraction of adult men in full-year non-employment increased from 17.1 to 21.6 percent. Previous research focused on the role of disability insurance policy and wage structure changes to explain this increase. Using Current Population Surveys from 1979 to 2003 we assess how much of the changes in full-year non-employment can be explained by demographic changes, possibly linked to health. With our empirical strategy we examine how 1978 to 2000 changes in demographic characteristics would have changed the distribution of weeks worked if policies and macroeconomic conditions ...
Working Paper
School vouchers and student achievement: recent evidence, remaining questions
In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher ...
Working Paper
Are Friends of Schools the Enemies of Equity? The Interplay of Public School Funding Policies and Private External Fundraising
School districts across the U.S. have adopted funding policies designed to distribute resources more equitably across schools. However, schools are also increasing external fundraising efforts to supplement district budget allocations. We document the interaction between funding policies and fundraising efforts in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). We find that adoption of a weighted-student funding policy successfully reallocated more dollars to schools with high shares of students eligible for free/reduced-price (FRL) lunch, creating a policy-induced per-pupil expenditure gap. Further, almost ...