From Preschool to College: The Impact of Education Policies over the Lifecycle
(with Jacob Wright) Link
Across all education levels, policymakers are using the re-sorting of students to diversify the socioeconomic composition of student bodies. We study how these integration policies interact, using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model featuring multiple periods of human capital development. Households sort into public schools through housing location, and into college via a competitive admissions process. Quality of schools and colleges are endogenous through peer effects. At the public school level, we simulate an integration policy that randomly shifts students across schools. For college, we consider an income-based affirmative action policy. Public school integration weakens the link between residential location and school quality, increasing intergenerational mobility by 2.5%. On the other hand, the college policy decreases intergenerational mobility by 0.7%: when the high-quality college reserves seats for low-income students, it makes college more competitive, which increases sorting at the public school level. In fact, an integration policy that combines public school re-sorting and college affirmative action leads to minimal changes in upwards mobility.
Public Education and Intergenerational Housing Wealth Effects
(with Michael Gilraine and James Graham) Link
[Revise and Resubmit: AEJ Macro]
While rising house prices benefit existing homeowners, we document a new channel through which price shocks have intergenerational wealth effects. Using panel data from school zones within a large U.S. school district, we find that higher local house prices lead to improvements in local school quality, thereby increasing child human capital and future incomes. We quantify this housing wealth channel using an overlapping generations model with neighborhood choice, spatial equilibrium, and endogenous school quality. Housing market shocks in the model generate large intra- and intergenerational wealth effects, with the latter accounting for over half of total wealth effects.
Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants by Refugee Status: An Analysis of Linked Landing Files and Tax Records
(with Wifag Adnan and Jonathan Zhang) Link
[Revise and Resubmit: JPE Micro]
Many studies show that immigrants have high upward mobility. However, immigrants are not a homogeneous group. Using administrative data linking the universe of immigrant landing documents with tax records, we estimate intergenerational mobility outcomes for children in the 1.5 generation by refugee status. We find that for immigrant parents at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, the expected rank for refugee and non-refugee children is 49 and 53 percentiles. Approximately two-thirds of this gap can be explained by differences in parental attributes upon arrival. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that absolute upward mobility among immigrants is overstated if underplacement (e.g., downward occupational mobility) is not accounted for.
Air Pollution and Student Performance in the U.S. (with Michael Gilraine) Link
[Forthcoming at Journal of Urban Economics: Insights]
We combine satellite-based pollution data and test scores from over 10,000 U.S. school districts to estimate the relationship between air pollution and test scores. To deal with potential endogeneity we instrument for air quality using (i) year-to-year coal production variation and (ii) a shift-share instrument that interacts fuel shares used for nearby power production with national growth rates. We find that each one-unit increase in particulate pollution reduces test scores by 0.02 standard deviations. Our findings indicate that declines in particulate pollution exposure raised test scores and reduced the black-white test score gap by 0.06 and 0.01 standard deviations, respectively.
[ Economic Inquiry, 2024] Link
A large literature documents a positive correlation between parental income and child test scores. In this paper, we study whether this relationship, the dependence of the cognitive skills of children on the socioeconomic resources of their parents, varies across race. Using education data linked to tax records, we find that the income-achievement gap is small for East Asian children while significantly larger for Indigenous children. School-level factors explains a large portion of the variation in the gap across race. Our results suggest that the large income-achievement gap for Indigenous students may be rooted in inequality in special needs status.
[ American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2022] Link
Public school funding depends heavily on local property tax revenue. Consequently, low-income households have limited access to quality education in neighborhoods with high house prices. In a dynamic life-cycle model with neighborhood choice and endogenous local school quality, we show that this property tax funding mechanism reduces intergenerational mobility and accounts for the spatial correlation between house prices and mobility. A housing voucher experiment improves access to schools, with benefits that can last for multiple generations. Additionally, a policy that redistributes property tax revenues equally across schools improves mobility and welfare. However, the benefits can take generations to be realized.
[American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2022] Link
This paper studies how school choice affects housing markets. Previous work has documented that school attendance zones lead to the capitalization of school quality into house prices. However, school choice, such as charter schools, which do not have catchment areas, break the link between residential location and school attendance. In turn, recent expansions of school choice should weaken the link between house prices and zoned school quality. To quantify this, I combine an event study that exploits time variation in the entry of charter schools with a boundary discontinuity design. I find that, on average, school choice decreases the willingness to pay for a standard deviation increase in school quality by 9 percentage points. My results show that charter schools induce changes in neighbourhood sorting as attendance zone boundaries lose their importance.
[ Canadian Journal of Economics, 2022 ]Link
We study the factors associated with compliance with social-distancing regulations using a unique dataset on the behaviour of Ontarians during the COVID-19 pandemic. To start, we build a simple theoretical model of social distancing in order to understand how some individual and community-level factors influence compliance. We test our model's predictions by designing and conducting a survey on Ontarians in which we elicit their degree of compliance with current distancing regulations as well as proposed regulations that impose different fine levels on violators or grant wage subsidies to encourage staying at home. In line with the model's predictions, we show that variables related to one's risk of infection (e.g., health status, age, necessity of working outside the home, regional COVID-19 cases) are significant predictors of compliance as are gender, political beliefs, risk and time preferences. Furthermore, we demonstrate that fines and wage subsidies can be powerful policy tools for promoting full compliance with regulations.