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EPI Working papers

Showing 1 - 30 of 61 results

EPI Working papers

Public School Funding, School Quality, & Adult Crime

March 1, 2022

Jason Baron, Joshua Hyman, Brittany Vasquez

This paper asks whether improving the quality of public schools can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of school quality improvements early in children's lives on the likelihood that...

EPI Working papers

College Majors and Skills: Evidence From the Universe of Online Job Ads

December 1, 2021

Steven Hemelt, Brad Hershbein, Shawn Martin, Kevin Stange

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors,...

Two students walking on a college campus

EPI Working papers

The Pandemic's Effect on Demand for Public Schools, Homeschooling, and Private Schools

September 1, 2021

Tareena Musaddiq, Kevin Stange, Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Joshua Goodman

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using student-level administrative data from Michigan and...

Teacher and students in class wearing masks

EPI Working papers

When do the Literacy Skills of Preschool Attenders and Non-Attenders Converge? Evidence from Boston

October 1, 2019

Christina Weiland, Anna Shapiro, Rebecca Unterman

Attending preschool improves children’s kindergarten readiness, but the cognitive outcomes of preschool attenders and non-attenders tend to converge partially or fully in elementary school. In older programs, most of the non-attender “catch up”...

EPI Working papers

Closing the Gap: The Effect of a Targeted, Tuition-Free Promise on College Choices of High Achieving, Low-Income Students

December 1, 2018

Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Stephanie Owen, CJ Labissi

Low-income students, even those with strong academic credentials, are unlikely to attend a highly selective college. With a field experiment, we test an intervention to increase enrollment of low-income students at the highly selective University of...

The University of Michigan's Hail Scholarship

EPI Working papers

School Finance Reforms, Teachers' Unions, and the Allocation of School Resources

June 1, 2018

Joshua Hyman, Eric Brunner, Andrew Ju

School finance reforms caused some of the most dramatic increases in intergovernmental aid from states to local governments in U.S. history. We examine whether teacher unions affected the fraction of reforminduced state aid that passed through to...

EPI Working papers

Nudges, College Enrollment, and College Persistence: Evidence from a Statewide Experiment in Michigan

May 1, 2018

Joshua Hyman

I conduct a statewide experiment in Michigan with nearly 50,000 high-achieving high school seniors. Treated students are mailed a letter encouraging them to consider college and providing them with the web address of a college information website. I...

EPI Working papers

Estimating the Effects of a Large Network of Charter Schools Managed by a For-profit Operator

March 1, 2018

Susan Dynarski, Daniel Hubbard, Brian Jacob

In this paper, we leverage randomized admissions lotteries to estimate the impact of attending a National Heritage Academy (NHA) charter school. NHA is the fourth largest for-profit charter operator in the country, enrolling more than 56,000...

Student walking down a hallway at school

EPI Working papers

Vocational and Career Tech Education in American High Schools: The Value of Depth Over Breadth

September 1, 2017

Daniel Kreisman, Kevin Stange

Vocational education is a large part of the high school curriculum, yet we have little understanding of what drives vocational enrollment or whether these courses help or harm early careers. To address this we develop a framework for curriculum...

Student completing a metalworking project

EPI Working papers

The Effect of Labor Market Information on Community College Students' Major Choice

April 1, 2017

Brian Jacob, Rachel Baker, Eric Bettinger, Ioana Marinescu

An important goal of community colleges is to prepare students for the labor market. But are students aware of the labor market outcomes in different majors? And how much do students weigh labor market outcomes when choosing a major? In this study...

EPI Working papers

Getting Student Financing Right in the US: Lessons from Australia and England

March 1, 2017

Susan Dynarski, Nicholas Barr, Bruce Chapman, Lorraine Dearden

The US student loan system is currently in crisis. US graduates owe $1.3 trillion in student loans; seven million borrowers are in default and even more are in arrears. The impact on borrowers is catastrophic. We argue that this is mainly due to the...

EPI Working papers

The Changing Federal Role in School Accountability

January 30, 2017

Brian Jacob

This is a point / counterpoint. The goal of the article is to discuss the influence of school accountability policies on educational inputs (e.g., funding, teacher quality, instructional practices, and school organization) as well as outputs (e.g.,...

EPI Working papers

Measuring Instructor Effectiveness in Higher Education

December 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Kevin Stange, Pieter De Vlieger

Instructors are a chief input into the higher education production process, yet we know very little about their role in promoting student success. This is in contrast to elementary and secondary schooling, for which ample evidence suggests teacher...

EPI Working papers

Price Regulation, Price Discrimination, and Equality of Opportunity in Higher Education: Evidence from Texas

December 1, 2016

Kevin Stange, Rodney Andrews

This paper assesses the importance of price regulation and price discrimination to low-income students' access to opportunities in public higher education. Following a policy change in the state of Texas that shifted tuition-setting authority away...

EPI Working papers

Does Money Matter in the Long Run? Effects of School Spending on Education Attainment

November 1, 2016

Joshua Hyman

This paper measures the effect of increased primary school spending on students' college enrollment and completion. Using student-level panel administrative data, I exploit variation in the school funding formula imposed by Michigan's 1994 school...

EPI Working papers

Can Technology Help Promote Equality of Educational Opportunities?

October 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Dan Berger, Cassandra Hart, Susanna Loeb

This chapter assesses the potential for several prominent technological innovations to promote equality of educational opportunities. We review the history of technological innovations in education and describe several prominent innovations,...

Two students collaborating on a computer assignment

EPI Working papers

The Measurement of Student Ability in Modern Assessment Systems

May 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Jesse Rothstein

Economists often use test scores to measure a student’s performance or an adult’s human capital. These scores reflect non-trivial decisions about how to measure and scale student achievement, with important implications for secondary analyses. For...

EPI Working papers

The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations

April 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Thomas Dee, Willie Dobbie, Jonah Rockoff

In this paper, we show that the design and decentralized, school-based scoring of New York’s high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to the systematic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Our...

EPI Working papers

Tax Benefits for College Attendance

March 1, 2016

Susan Dynarski, Judith Scott-Clayton

National efforts to promote college enrollment are increasingly delivered through tax-based assistance, including tax credits and deductions for tuition and fees, tax-advantaged college savings plans, and student loan interest deductions. This paper...

EPI Working papers

Teacher Applicant Hiring and Teacher Performance: Evidence from DC Public Schools

March 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Jonah Rockoff, Eric Taylor, Benjamin Lindy, Rachel Rosen

Selecting more effective teachers among job applicants during the hiring process could be a highly cost-effective means of improving educational quality, but there is little research that links information gathered during the hiring process to...

EPI Working papers

Are Expectations Alone Enough? Estimating the Effect of a Mandatory College-Prep Curriculum in Michigan

January 1, 2016

Brian Jacob, Susan Dynarski, Kenneth Frank, Barbara Schneider

This paper examines the impacts of the Michigan Merit Curriculum (MMC), a statewide college-preparatory curriculum that applies to the high school graduating class of 2008 and later. We use a student, longitudinal database for all public school...

EPI Working papers

A New Measure of College Quality to Study the Effects of College Sector and Peers on Degree Attainment

October 1, 2015

Kevin Stange, Jonathan Smith

Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate with a college degree than similar students who start at a four-year college but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. In this paper we simultaneously...

EPI Working papers

Investing in Schools: Capital Spending, Facility Conditions and Student Achievement

September 1, 2015

Kevin Stange, Paco Martorell, Issac McFarlin

Public investments in repairs, modernization, and construction of schools cost billions. However, little is known about the nature of school facility investments, whether it actually changes the physical condition of public schools, and the...

EPI Working papers

When Evidence is Not Enough: Findings from a Randomized Evaluation of Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction

February 1, 2015

Brian Jacob

This paper reports the results of an experimental evaluation of Evidence Based Literacy Instruction (EBLI). Developed over 15 years ago, EBLI aims to provide teachers with instructional strategies to improve reading accuracy, fluency and...

EPI Working papers

Labor Market Returns to Community College Awards: Evidence from Michigan

January 1, 2015

Susan Dynarski, Brian Jacob, Daniel Kreisman, Mark Wiederspan, Alfredo Sosa, Ioana Marinescu, Eric Bettinger, Rachel Baker

Community colleges serve those whose labor market productivity is critical to national economic progress: first-generation college students, displaced workers, minority students, and low-income students. Yet we know relatively little about...

EPI Working papers

Marginal Pricing and Student Investment in Higher Education

December 1, 2014

Steven Hemelt, Kevin Stange

This paper examines the effect of marginal price on students’ educational investments using rich administrative data on students at Michigan public universities. Marginal price refers to the amount colleges charge for each additional credit taken in...

EPI Working papers

An Economist's Perspective on Student Loans in the United States

September 1, 2014

Susan Dynarski

In this paper, I provide an economic perspective on policy issues related to student debt in the United States. I lay out the economic rationale for government provision of student loans and summarize time trends in student borrowing. I describe the...

EPI Working papers

The Missing Manual: Using National Student Clearinghouse Data to Track Postsecondary Outcomes

October 1, 2013

Susan Dynarski, Steven Hemelt, Joshua Hyman

This paper explores the promises and pitfalls of using National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data to measure a variety of postsecondary outcomes. We first describe the history of the NSC, the basic structure of its data, and recent research interest...

EPI Working papers

Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston's Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry and Choice

September 1, 2013

Susan Dynarski, Joshua Angrist, Sarah Cohodes, Parag Pathak, Christopher Walters

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of attendance at Boston's charter high schools on college preparation, college attendance, and college choice. Charter attendance increases pass rates on the high-stakes exam required for high...

EPI Working papers

Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion

July 1, 2013

Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry,...

Student paying attention to teacher in class