University of Colorado Boulder
Costly Withdrawals Reduce Future College-Going for Low-Income Students: Evidence from Return of Title IV Funds
Governments must strike a balance between promoting access to financial aid while at the same time remaining good stewards of taxpayer funds by preventing fraudulent access. This paper focuses on one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain… more →
A Family Affair: The Effects of College on Parent and Student Finances
Paying for college is often a family affair, with both parents and students contributing. We study the effects of college on family finances using administrative data on the universe of federal aid applicants in California linked to credit records. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of… more →
Self-Interest in Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections
In this paper, we show that the election of a new school board member causes home values in their neighborhood to rise. This increase is identified using narrowly-decided contests and is driven by non-Democratic members, whose neighborhoods appreciate about 4% on average relative to those of… more →
The Long-Run Impacts of Mexican-American School Desegregation
We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican-American school children in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attainment for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites in… more →
Understanding Teacher Perceptions of Efficacy in Social and Emotional Learning: Toward Equity-Based Approaches to SEL in Urban Schools
Researchers have noted the importance of equity-based approaches to social and emotional learning (SEL), which emphasize the role of school environment, including adult beliefs, in student well-being. This article builds on this work by examining 129 teachers’ perceptions of efficacy in SEL.… more →
School's Out: The Role of Summers in Understanding Achievement Disparities
Summer learning loss (SLL) is a familiar and much-studied phenomenon, yet new concerns that measurement artifacts distorted canonical SLL findings create a need to revisit basic research on SLL. Though race/ethnicity and SES only account for about 4% of the variance in SLL, nearly all prior work… more →
The Effects of Full-day Pre-kindergarten: Experimental Evidence of Impacts on Children’s School Readiness
This study is a randomized control trial of full- versus half-day pre-kindergarten in a school district near Denver, Colorado. Four-year-old children were randomly assigned an offer of half-day (four days/week) or full-day (five days/week) pre-k that increased class time by over 600 hours. The… more →