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Returns to education and skills
The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceEach year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation… more →
Noncredit Workforce Training, Industry Credentials, and Labor Market Outcomes
Many public workforce training programs lead to industry-recognized, third-party awarded credentials, but little research has been conducted on the economic benefits of these credentials in the labor market. This paper provides quasi-experimental evidence on the labor market returns to industry-… more →
Localized Teacher Recruitment through “Grow-Your-Own”: Impacts of the High School Teacher Academy of Maryland Program
Recruiting teachers via “grow-your-own” (GYO) programs is a popular, yet rarely evaluated, strategy for addressing local workforce shortages and ensuring that incoming teachers resemble, understand, and have strong connections to their communities. We provide novel evidence on the impacts… more →
Closing gaps for racial minorities and immigrants through school-to-work linkages and occupational match
This study investigates the role of college major choices in labor market outcomes, with a focus on racial minorities and immigrants. Drawing upon research on school-to-work linkages, we examine two measures, linkage – the connection between college majors and specific occupations in the labor… more →
Marginal Returns to Public Universities
This paper studies the returns to enrolling in American public universities by comparing the long-term outcomes of barely admitted versus barely rejected applicants. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of all… more →
Are Students On Track?: Comparing the Predictive Validity of Administrative and Survey Measures of Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills for Long-Term Outcomes
Education leaders need valid metrics to predict students’ long-term success. We use a unique dataset with cognitive skills, self-regulation, behavior, course performance, and test scores for 8th-grade students from a Northeast school district. We link these data to students' high school outcomes… more →
COVID-19, School Closures, and Student Learning Outcomes: New Global Evidence from PISA
Topics: Student LearningThe COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant disruption in schooling worldwide. This paper uses global test score data to estimate learning losses. It models the effect of school closures on achievement by predicting the deviation of the most recent results from a linear trend using data from… more →
What Works and For Whom? Effectiveness and Efficiency of School Capital Investments Across the U.S.
This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased… more →
Unintended Consequences of Youth Entrepreneurship Programs: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda
The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda’s entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student… more →
When Pell Today Doesn’t Mean Pell Tomorrow: Evaluating Aid Programs With Dynamic Eligibility
Topics: MethodsGenerally, need-based financial aid improves students’ academic outcomes. However, the largest source of need-based grant aid in the United States, the Federal Pell Grant Program (Pell), has a mixed evaluation record. We assess the minimum Pell Grant in a regression discontinuity framework,… more →
A Global Regression Discontinuity Design: Theory and Application to Grade Retention Policies
Topics: MethodsWe use a marginal treatment effect (MTE) representation of a fuzzy regression discontinuity setting to propose a novel estimation approach. The estimator can be thought of as extrapolating a traditional fuzzy regression discontinuity estimate or as an observational study that adjusts for… more →
Do Women Still Earn Less than Men after College Graduation: Evidence from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study 1993 Cohort
Even though women have continuously caught up with men in education attainment and labor market participation since the 1970s, the wage gap between men and women still universally exists today. Do female college graduates still earn less than their male counterparts if men’s and women’s “… more →
Debt Moratoria: Evidence from Student Loan Forbearance
We evaluate the effects of the 2020 student debt moratorium that paused payments for student loan borrowers. Using administrative credit panel data, we show that the payment pause led to a sharp drop in student loan payments and delinquencies for borrowers subject to the debt moratorium, as well… more →
Who Scars the Easiest? College Quality and the Effects of Graduating into a Recession
Graduating from college into a recession is associated with earnings losses, but less is known about how these effects vary across colleges. Using restricted-use data from the National Survey of College Graduates, we study how the effects of graduating into worse economic conditions vary over… more →
The Increasing Penalty to Occupation-Education Mismatch
College-educated workers in jobs unrelated to their degree generally receive lower wages compared to well-matched workers. Our analysis of data from the National Survey of College Graduates shows that although the rate of this mismatch declined only slightly (19% to 17%), the wage penalty… more →
Educational Consequences of a Sibling’s Disability: Evidence from type 1 diabetes
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWhile there is a growing literature on family health spillovers, questions remain about how sibling disability status impacts educational outcomes. As disability is not randomly assigned this is an empirical challenge. In this paper we use Danish administrative data and variation in the onset of… more →
Understanding High Schools’ Effects on Longer-Term Outcomes
Topics: Student LearningImproving education and labor market outcomes for low-income students is critical for advancing socioeconomic mobility in the United States. We use longitudinal data on five cohorts of 9th grade students to explore how Massachusetts public high schools affect the longer-term outcomes of students… more →
Are Four-Year Public Colleges Engines for Economic Mobility? Evidence from Statewide Admissions Thresholds
Four-year public colleges may play an important role in supporting intergenerational mobility by providing an accessible path to a bachelor’s degree and increasing students' earnings. Leveraging a midsize state’s GPA- and SAT-based admissions thresholds for the four-year public sector, I use a… more →
What makes a program good? Evidence from short-cycle higher education programs in five developing countries
Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) can play a central role in skill development and higher education expansion, yet their quality varies greatly within and among countries. In this paper we explore the relationship between programs’ practices and inputs (quality determinants) and… more →
The Stubborn Unresponsiveness of Youth Voter Turnout to Civic Education: Quasi-experimental Evidence from State-Mandated Civics Tests
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceYouth voter turnout remains stubbornly low and unresponsive to civic education. Rigorous evaluations of the adoption of civic tests for high school graduation by some states on youth voter turnout remain limited. We estimate the impact of a recent, state-mandated civics test policy—the Civics… more →