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Neighborhoods
Choice and Change: The Implications of Charter School Expansion for School and Neighborhood Diversity in NYC
Topics: School ChoiceIn this paper we estimate the effect of charter schools on the diversity of nearby traditional public schools (TPSs) and neighborhoods in New York City. We employ a difference-in-differences approach that exploits the differences in the expansion of the charter sector between grades in the same… more →
Self-Interest in Public Service: Evidence from School Board Elections
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceIn 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 →
Do Long Bus Rides Drive Down Academic Outcomes?
Topics: Families and CommunitiesTags: Neighborhoods, TransportationSchool buses may be a critical education policy lever, breaking the link between schools and neighborhoods and facilitating access to school choice. Yet little is known about the commute for bus riders, including the average length of the bus ride or whether long commutes harm academic outcomes… more →
Digital redlining: the relevance of 20th century housing policy to 21st century broadband access and education
Topics: Families and CommunitiesBroadband is not equally accessible among students despite its increasing importance to education. We investigate the relationship between broadband and housing policy by joining two measures of broadband access with Depression-era redlining maps that classified neighborhoods based in part on… more →
Informal social interactions, behavior, and academic achievement
Topics: Student LearningWe study the effects of informal social interactions on academic achievement and behavior using idiosyncratic variation in peer groups stemming from changes in bus routes across elementary, middle, and high school. In early grades, a one standard-deviation change in the value-added of same-grade… more →
Higher Education and Local Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Establishment of U.S. Colleges
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Equity, NeighborhoodsWe investigate how the presence of a college affects local educational attainment using historical natural experiments in which "runner-up" locations were strongly considered to become college sites but ultimately not chosen for as-good-as-random reasons. While runner-up counties have since had… more →
Are public housing projects good for kids after all?
Topics: Families and CommunitiesIs public housing bad for children? Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the… more →
Choosing Alone? Peer Similarity in High School Choices
Topics: School ChoiceWe provide a descriptive analysis of within-school and neighborhood similarity in high school applications in New York City. We depart from prior work by examining similarity in applications to specific schools rather than preferences for school characteristics. We find surprisingly low… more →
Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students
Topics: Student LearningWe study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among… more →
The Lingering Legacy of Redlining on School Funding, Diversity, and Performance
Topics: Families and CommunitiesBetween 1935-1940 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) assigned A (minimal risk) to D (hazardous) grades to neighborhoods that reflected their lending risk from previously issued loans and visualized these grades on color-coded maps, which arguably influenced banks and other mortgage lenders… more →
Can Community Crime Monitoring Reduce Student Absenteeism?
Topics: Student Well-BeingTags: Absenteeism, NeighborhoodsIn this paper we study the impact on student absenteeism of a large school-based community crime monitoring program that employed local community members to monitor and report crime on designated city blocks during students’ travel to and from school. We find that the program resulted in a 0.78… more →
Are Power Plant Closures a Breath of Fresh Air? Local Air Quality and School Absences
Topics: Families and CommunitiesIn this paper we study the effects of three large, nearly-simultaneous coal-fired power plant closures on school absences in Chicago. We find that the closures resulted in a 7 percent reduction in absenteeism in nearby schools relative to those farther away following the closures. For the… more →
Coal Use and Student Performance
Topics: Student Well-BeingTags: Neighborhoods, AssessmentWe examine the effect of air pollution from power production on students' cognitive outcomes by leveraging year-to-year production variation, wind patterns, and plant closures. We find that every one million megawatt hours of coal-fired power production decreases student performance in schools… more →