Search Results
Working Paper
Societal Disruptions and Child Mental Health: Evidence from ADHD Diagnosis During the Covid-19 Pandemic
We study how the societal disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic impacted diagnosis of a prevalent childhood mental health condition, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Using both nationwide private health insurance claims and a state’s comprehensive electronic health records, we compare children exposed to the pandemic to same aged children prior to the pandemic. We find the pandemic reduced new ADHD diagnoses by 8.6% among boys and 11.0% among girls nationwide through February 2021. We further show that higher levels of in-person schooling in fall 2020 dampened the decline for ...
Working Paper
Driving, Dropouts, and Drive-Throughs: Mobility Restrictions and Teen Human Capita
We provide evidence that graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, originally intended to improve public safety, impact both high school completion and teen employment. Many teens use automobiles to commute both to school and to employment. Because school and work decisions are interrelated, the effects of automobile-specific mobility restrictions are ex ante ambiguous. Combining variation in the timing of both GDL law adoption and changes in compulsory school laws into a triple-difference research design shows that restricting teen mobility significantly reduces high school dropout rates and ...
Journal Article
Do the benefits of college still outweigh the costs?
In recent years, students have been paying more to attend college and earning less upon graduation?trends that have led many observers to question whether a college education remains a good investment. However, an analysis of the economic returns to college since the 1970s demonstrates that the benefits of both a bachelor?s degree and an associate?s degree still tend to outweigh the costs, with both degrees earning a return of about 15 percent over the past decade. The return has remained high in spite of rising tuition and falling earnings because the wages of those without a college degree ...
Report
The long road to recovery: New York Schools in the aftermath of the Great Recession
Schools play a crucial role in human capital development, and were one of the many elements of government adversely affected by the Great Recession. Using a rich panel data set of New York State school districts and a trend-shift analysis, we examine how the funding and expenditure dynamics of districts have changed in the four years since the recession hit. We find that although the stimulus prevented major cuts to expenditures while it was in place, once the stimulus funding was used up districts faced strong budget constraints and made deep cuts to their expenditures. While state and local ...
Working Paper
The effect of foreclosure on Boston Public School student academic performance
Although the recent wave of mortgage foreclosures has clearly been accompanied by economic hardship, relatively little research has examined how foreclosures affect the academic performance of students. This paper investigates the relationship between mortgage foreclosures and the academic performance of students using a unique dataset that matches information on the standardized test scores and attendance of individual Boston Public School students with real estate records indicating whether the student lived at an address involved in foreclosure and whether that student's parent or guardian ...
Working Paper
Should Children Do More Enrichment Activities? Leveraging Bunching to Correct for Endogeneity
We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration that children forgo alternative activities, such as play and socializing, in order to spend time on enrichment. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a novel approach which leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, which gives us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills. ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Tobacco-Free School Laws on Student and Staff Smoking Behavior
A number of US states have enacted bans on tobacco use by students, staff, and visitors anywhere on the grounds of public elementary and secondary schools statewide. These laws are intended to reduce tobacco use, reduce exposure to secondhand smoke, reinforce anti-tobacco curricula taught in schools, and prevent children from viewing their teachers and fellow students using tobacco products. We examine the impact that the laws have on the smoking behavior of students, teachers, and other school staff by estimating difference-in-differences models that exploit the time variation in adoption of ...
Working Paper
Evidence on the Production of Cognitive Achievement from Moving to Opportunity
This paper performs a subgroup analysis on the effect of receiving a Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing voucher on test scores. I find evidence of heterogeneity by number of children in the household in Boston, gender in Chicago, and race/ethnicity in Los Angeles. To study the mechanisms driving voucher effect heterogeneity, I develop a generalized Rubin Causal Model and propose an estimator to identify transition-specific Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) of school and neighborhood quality. Although I cannot identify such LATEs with the MTO data, the analysis demonstrates that ...
Working Paper
Confidence, Financial Literacy and Investment in Risky Assets: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances
We employ recent Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) microdata from the US to analyze the impacts of confidence in one’s own financial knowledge, confidence in the economy, and objective financial literacy on investment in risky financial assets (equity and bonds) on both the extensive and intensive margins. Controlling for a rich set of covariates including risk aversion, we find that objective financial literacy is positively related to investment in risky assets as well as debt securities. Moreover, confidence in own financial skills additionally increases the probability of holding risky ...
Report
Still not out of the woods? New Jersey schools during the recession and beyond
Schools are essential in forming human capital and in improving the long-term health of the economy. They are also heavily reliant on state and local funds, which were severely depleted during the Great Recession. To alleviate some of the strain on local budgets, the federal government passed and implemented a large stimulus package, which included funds for school districts. However, the stimulus funds were drawn down beginning in 2011, at a time when state and local revenues were still under pressure. In this paper, we use a detailed panel data set of all school districts in New Jersey for ...