Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from the Great Recession
Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence finds that when school budgets are strained, public schools can employ cost-saving measures with no ill-effect on...
View ArticleWhat is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the...
Is a school’s impact on high-stakes test scores a good measure of its overall impact on students? Do parents value school impacts on high-stakes tests, longer-run outcomes, or both? To answer the first...
View ArticleRebuttal_AEJ_arkansas_post.pdf
This is a response to Goldstein and McGee (2020). For access the to forthcoming paper and the online appendix click here: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20180674&&from=f
View ArticleWho Benefits From Attending Effective Schools? Examining Heterogeneity in...
We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development and behaviors in 9th grade) for...
View ArticleThe Distribution of School Spending Impacts
We use estimates across all known "credibly causal" studies to examine the distributions of the causal effects of public K12 school spending on test scores and educational attainment in the United...
View ArticleEducation_covid_post.pdf
Canonical human capital theories posit that education, by enhancing worker skills, reduces the likelihood that a worker will be laid-off during times of economic change. Yet, this has not been...
View ArticleCan Introducing Single-Sex Education into Low-Performing Schools Improve...
In 2010, the Ministry of Education in Trinidad and Tobago converted 20 low-performing secondary schools from coeducational to single-sex. I exploit these conversions to identify the policy-relevant...
View ArticleWhen Does School Autonomy Improve Student Outcomes?
This paper presents new evidence on the benefits of decentralization in public education, focusing on a Chicago policy that granted school principals more control over budgeting and operations....
View Article