Job Market Paper:
Supply Side Responses in School Choice (with Brianna Felegi)
Despite the growing size of private-school voucher programs, our understanding of their effectiveness relies on results from small-scale randomized control trials. In this paper, we show that those results may not translate to programs at scale by examining changes in school quality following the implementation of the largest voucher program in the United States, the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program. We find that public schools facing high exposure to the policy increased their quality while participating private schools decreased their quality. Public schools with below-median baseline school value-added drive our results, suggesting that the gap in public school quality is shrinking because of the program. We explore these effects in a model of household demand for schools. We show that the incentive to provide quality is nonlinear. Voucher programs only threaten public school enrollment when the voucher amount is large or when a significant proportion of students are eligible to participate. Policymakers interested in adopting and expanding these programs should consider these indirect and nonlinear effects to understand vouchers’ impact on educational outcomes.
Working Papers:
The Effect of Field Training Officers on Police Use of Force (with CarlyWill Sloan and Matt Ross)
Over the past decade, police use of force has become an increasingly charged political issue with growing calls for reform. One of the few reforms where advocates and the policing community have reached a consensus is on the need for improved and expanded training. In this paper, we study an under-researched but nearly universal training approach whereby a recruit is paired with a senior officer during a phase referred to as “field training”. In particular, we consider the link between a field training officer’s prior propensity to use force and a recruit’s subsequent enforcement behavior. We leverage a unique setting where recruits are as-good-as-randomly assigned to field training officers and where we have detailed information on the universe of calls for service. We document meaningful differences across field training officers in terms of their propensity to use force prior to being paired with a recruit. Further, we find that a one standard deviation increase in a field training officer’s propensity to use force (138 percent) is associated with a 12 percent increase in their recruit’s subsequent propensity to use force. The effect of having a more aggressive field training officer persists for as much as two and a half years after the recruit completes training.