Knowledge that Transforms

We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes in Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and 4-year college enrollment but have a statistically insignificant impact on earnings, although the coefficient is almost identical to what one would expect given the correlation between test scores and wages. Other types of charter schools decrease test scores, 4-year college enrollment, and earnings, and surprisingly the decrease in wages is more negative than one would anticipate.

On the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, high-wage job postings unexpectedly attract fewer applicants, and this is the case even within a detailed occupation. Viewed through the lens of our directed search model, this negative relationship is indicative of substantial applicant heterogeneity within an occupation. Empirically, we find that job title heterogeneity is key: within a job title, jobs with 10% higher wages do attract 7.7% more applicants. Furthermore, our findings are consistent with a higher return to worker quality for hires in “manager” and “senior” job titles. Overall, our findings demonstrate the power of words in the matching process.

Little is known about the role birth order plays in delinquency and adult crime outcomes that carry significant externalities. We use rich data sets from Denmark and Florida to examine these outcomes and explore potential mechanisms. Despite large environmental differences between the areas, we find remarkably consistent results: in families with two or more children, secondborn boys are 20%–40% more likely to be disciplined in school and enter the criminal justice system than are their firstborn male siblings. We rule out health at birth and school quality as mechanisms but find evidence for the role of parental time investment.

This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City public schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across 3 years, schools offered at least 130 hours of four-on-one tutoring based on a guided reading model. At the mean, tutoring had a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive but insignificant effect on English language arts (ELA) state test scores, and no effect on math state test scores. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year.

Increasing access to education may have consequences that go beyond effects on marginal students encouraged to enroll. It may change peer effects, school quality, and returns to skill. This paper studies how classmates and teaching inputs affect learning of university students, exploiting an educational expansion in Italian STEM majors. Newly collected data on 27,236 students indicate that less prepared classmates and congestion of teaching resources lowered learning of incumbent students in STEM fields. Their learning, however, increased in courses in which the new classmates raised average preparedness. These effects might have had long-lasting consequences on the returns to STEM degrees.

This paper investigates the relationship between aspirations and inequality in higher education participation. Using a regression discontinuity design, I evaluate the impact of a national-scale United Kingdom policy aimed at raising the aspirations toward college education of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds by involving them in outreach activities. The results show that the policy successfully raised the aspirations of the target students and their participation in postcompulsory education. However, its final effect on college enrollment was on the whole negligible, thus casting doubt on the effectiveness of policies that uniquely leverage aspirations to reduce inequality in educational attainment.

Caseworkers are the main human resources used to provide social services. This paper asks whether and how much caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss unemployment insurance caseworkers. I find that individuals who lose a meeting with their caseworker stay unemployed 5% longer. Results show large heterogeneity in the personal impact of caseworkers: the effect of a forgone meeting is zero for caseworkers in the lower half of the productivity distribution but is more than twice the average effect for caseworkers in the upper half.

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess teacher quality with value-added measures of impacts on student test scores, using administrative data on over 30,000 Florida public school teachers. Consistent with a Roy model of occupational choice, teachers entering the profession during recessions are significantly more effective in raising student test scores. Results are supported by robustness tests and unlikely to be driven by differential attrition.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how social environment affects women’s STEM choices as early as high school. Using administrative data from China, we find that exposure to high-performing female peers in mathematics increases the likelihood that women choose a science track during high school, while exposure to more high-performing males decrease this likelihood. We also find that peer quality has persistent effects on college outcomes. Overall, there is little evidence of peer effects for boys. Our results suggest that girls doing well in mathematics provide an affirmation effect that encourages female classmates to pursue a STEM track.

We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A $1, 000 increase in student loan debt lowers the homeownership rate by about 1.5 percentage points for public 4-year college-goers during their mid 20s, equivalent to an average delay of 2.5 months in attaining homeownership. Validity tests suggest that the results are not confounded by local economic conditions or changes in educational outcomes.