Jian Zou

Little is known about the impact of peer personality on human capital formation. The paper studies the impact of peers’ persistence, a personality trait reflecting perseverance in the face of challenges and setbacks, on student achievement. Exploiting student-classroom random assignments in middle schools in China, I find that having more persistent peers improves student achievement. I identify three mechanisms: (i) an increase in students’ own persistence and self-disciplined behaviors, (ii) teachers exhibiting greater responsibility and patience, along with increased time spent on teaching preparation, and (iii) the formation of endogenous friendship networks characterized by academically successful peers and fewer disruptive peers, especially among students with similar levels of persistence.

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This paper studies how school spending impacts student achievement by exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation as state tax revenue shocks. Leveraging school finance data from universal school districts, our difference-in-differences estimation reveals that deregulation leads to an increase in per-pupil total revenue and expenditure. The rise in revenue is primarily attributed to higher state revenues, while the expenditure increase is more prominent in low-income school districts. Using restricted-use student assessments from the Nation’s Report Card, we find that deregulation results in improved student achievement, with no distributional effects evident across students’ ability, race, or free lunch status. We introduce an instrumental variables approach that accounts for dynamic treatment effects and estimate that a one-thousand-dollar increase in per-pupil spending leads to a 0.035 standard deviation improvement in student achievement.

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The debate on the stringency of licensure exams for prospective public school teachers is on-going, including the recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). We leverage the quasi-experimental setting of different adoption timing by states and analyze multiple data sources containing a national sample of prospective teachers and students of new teachers in the US. With extensive controls of concurrent policies, we  find that the edTPA reduced prospective teachers in undergraduate programs, less-selective and minority-concentrated universities. Contrary to the policy intention, we do not  find evidence that edTPA increased student test scores.

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