In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary teachers (those with fewer than 5 years of experience) for any reason and without the hearing process typical in many urban districts. Results suggest that the policy reduced annual teacher absences by roughly 10% and reduced the incidence of frequent absences by 25%. The majority of the effect was due to changes in the composition of teachers in the district, although there is evidence of modest incentive effects for young untenured teachers.

This paper utilizes a plausibly exogenous source of variation in housing assistance generated by public housing demolitions in Chicago to examine the impact of high-rise public housing on student outcomes. I find that children in households affected by the demolitions do no better or worse than their peers on a wide variety of achievement measures. Because the majority of households that leave high-rise public housing in response to the demolitions move to neighborhoods and schools that closely resemble those they left, the zero effect of the demolitions may be interpreted as the independent impact of public housing.

We examine how well principals can distinguish between more and less effective teachers. To put principal evaluations in context, we compare them with the traditional determinants of teacher compensation—education and experience—as well as value‐added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains. We present “out‐of‐sample” predictions that mitigate concerns that the teacher quality and student achievement measures are determined simultaneously. We find that principals can generally identify teachers who produce the largest and smallest standardized achievement gains but have far less ability to distinguish between teachers in the middle of this distribution.

We explore how much borrowers value student debt relief in the setting of the federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness program, which cancels between $5,000 and $17,500 in debt for teachers at high-need schools. Using both quasi-experimental evidence and a randomized controlled trial, we find that neither eligibility nor a targeted information intervention affects employment decisions. Information was found to increase application and receipt rates for teachers who had achieved eligibility. Evidence from contingent valuation surveys suggests that teachers do in general value debt relief. Incorporating qualitative evidence, we conclude that take-up may be constrained by program complexity and administrative barriers.

As standards and accountability have become increasingly prominent features of the educational landscape, educators have relied more on remedial programs such as summer school and grade retention to help low-achieving students meet minimum academic standards. Yet the evidence on the effectiveness of such programs is mixed, and prior research suffers from selection bias. However, recent school reform efforts in Chicago provide an opportunity to examine the causal impact of these remedial education programs. In 1996, the Chicago Public Schools instituted an accountability policy that tied summer school and promotional decisions to performance on standardized tests, which resulted in a highly nonlinear relationship between current achievement and the probability of attending summer school or being retained. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the net effect of these programs was to substantially increase academic achievement among third-graders, but not sixth-graders. In addition, contrary to conventional wisdom and prior research, we find that retention increases achievement for third-grade students and has little effect on math achievement for sixth-grade students.

This paper investigates whether demand-side market pressure explains colleges’ decisions to provide consumption amenities to their students. Using a discrete choice model of college demand, we find that most students appear to value consumption amenities, such as operating spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories, while the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students. Heterogeneity in student preferences creates variation in demand pressure across institutions, which we estimate can account for 11% of the total variation in the ratio of amenity to academic spending across 4-year colleges in the United States.

Abstract One long-standing motivation for low-income housing programs is the possibility that housing affordability and housing conditions generate externalities, including on children’s behavior and long-term life outcomes. We take advantage of a randomized housing voucher lottery in Chicago in 1997 to examine the long-term impact of housing assistance on a wide variety of child outcomes, including schooling, health, and criminal involvement. In contrast to most prior work focusing on families in public housing, we focus on families living in unsubsidized private housing at baseline, for whom voucher receipt generates large changes in both housing and nonhousing consumption. We find that the receipt of housing assistance has little, if any, impact on neighborhood or school quality or on a wide range of important child outcomes.

This study estimates the effects of means-tested housing programs on labor supply using data from a randomized housing voucher wait-list lottery in Chicago. Economic theory is ambiguous about the expected sign of any labor supply response. We find that among working-age, able-bodied adults, housing voucher use reduces labor force participation by around 4 percentage points (6 percent) and quarterly earnings by $329 (10 percent), and increases Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program participation by around 2 percentage points (15 percent). We find no evidence that the housing-specific mechanisms hypothesized to promote work, such as neighborhood quality or residential stability, are important empirically. (JEL I38, J22, R23, R38)

This paper examines the short-term effect of school on juvenile crime. To do so, we bring together daily measures of criminal activity and detailed school calendar information from 29 jurisdictions across the country, and utilize the plausibly exogenous variation generated by teacher in-service days. We find that the level of property crime committed by juveniles decreases by 14 percent on days when school is in session, but the level of violent crime increases by 28 percent on such days. Our findings suggest that both incapacitation and concentration influence juvenile crime.