Research
Research
The Causal Effect of 12-Month Postpartum Medicaid Extensions on Child Maltreatment and Infant Welfare
This project evaluates the causal impact of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act’s 12-month postpartum Medicaid extension on child welfare, specifically investigating whether continuous maternal coverage reduces infant maltreatment. Utilizing a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) and Triple Difference (DDD) framework across state adoption timelines, I leverage NCANDS data to compare maltreatment rates of infants against an older control cohort. By disentangling the "prevention effect" of reduced family strain from the "surveillance effect" of increased medical reporting, this research anticipates a measurable decline in neglect cases and highlights the two-generation benefits of postpartum healthcare access.
Cross-National Variance in Relative Age Effects: Evidence from 40 Educational Systems
Students subject to a single, annual school-entry cutoff date experience significant age differences at the time of school entry. This maturity gap frequently results in older students outperforming their younger peers—a phenomenon known as the relative age effect (RAE). While RAE is well-documented within individual, high-income nations, its crossnational magnitude and variance across diverse global systems remain under explored. A primary barrier to this international comparison is administrative data misalignment, where empirical student ages often diverge from official cutoff policies. To accurately document the global nature of this phenomenon without introducing systemic administrative bias, this study leverages 4th-grade data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), deliberately restricting the analytical sample to 40 educational systems demonstrating high-fidelity compliance with official school-entry cutoffs. Using assigned relative age as an instrumental variable, the analysis confirms that positive relative age effects are a global phenomenon. However, their magnitude varies significantly, manifesting with much less intensity in low- and middle-income countries than in high-income systems. These findings establish RAE as a universal yet institutionally moderated educational phenomenon.
The Impact of International Students on Minorities in US Higher Education
Using data from IPEDS, this paper examines the impact of the inflow of international students on the first-time, full-time enrollment of domestic minority students. Since foreign enrollment is an endogenous variable, I employ the instrumental variables approach, using the institution's historical share of international students and the year's non-immigrant visa issuance. I find that there is no significant effect of the influx of international students on the new enrollment of domestic minorities as a whole. However, when I divide the institutions by the level of state funding per student, I find that an additional influx of international students increases domestic minority FTFT enrollment by 0.65. I suggest that this is because institutions with relatively little reliance on government funding are more sensitive to the financial resources that international students bring in terms of determining the supply and demand of domestic minority enrollment.