University of Rochester
The Effects of Immigration Enforcement on Student Outcomes in a New Era of Immigration Policy in the United States
This study presents the first evidence, to our knowledge, of the effects of the surge in interior immigration apprehensions in 2025 in the United States on student academic performance using detailed student-level administrative records from Florida. We find evidence that immigration enforcement… more →
Education Governance and Race: An Analysis of School Board Discourse Using Large Language Models
Despite growing attention to school boards, it is unclear whether they primarily operate as bureaucratic forums, policy-making bodies, or arenas for contentious debate—particularly on issues of race. Recent controversies suggest increasing public engagement and conflict, but little evidence… more →
The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida
Cellphone bans in schools have become a popular policy in recent years in the United States, yet very little is known about their effects on student outcomes. In this study, we try to fill this gap by examining the causal effects of bans on student test scores, suspensions, and absences using… more →
Competitive Effects of Charter Schools
Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We… more →
Sibling Spillovers May Enhance the Efficacy of Targeted School Policies
Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of… more →
Identification of Non-Additive Fixed Effects Models: Is the Return to Teacher Quality Homogeneous?
Panel or grouped data are often used to allow for unobserved individual heterogeneity in econometric models via fixed effects. In this paper, we discuss identification of a panel data model in which the unobserved heterogeneity both enters additively and interacts with treatment variables. We… more →
Assessing School District Decision-Making: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts' choices of learning modality -- whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction -- over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The… 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 →
Student Misconduct and Learning Outcomes Evidence from Pennsylvania’s K-12 Building Records: 1999-2018
This paper compares and contrasts two required building level school violence measures under NCLB, arrests and incidents of well-defined school misconduct acts, across 20 years of Pennsylvania’s approximately 3,000 public school buildings. Generally, both arrests for school violence and… more →
School Boards and Education Production: Evidence from Randomized Ballot Order
We examine the causal influence of educators elected to the school board on local education production. The key empirical challenge is that school board composition is endogenously determined through the electoral process. To overcome this, we develop a novel research design that leverages… more →
Test-Based Accountability and the Effectiveness of School Finance Reforms
A recent literature provides new evidence that school resources are important for student outcomes. In this paper, we show that school finance reform-induced increases in student performance are driven by those states that had test-based accountability policies in place at the time. By… more →
Horizontal Differentiation and the Policy Effect of Charter Schools
While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is viewed as imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on education quality while accounting… more →