My interests focus on education policy and the economics of education. I have had the opportunity to explore these topics in both the higher education and K-12 sectors. Regardless of the research topic, I've been able to build a process of conducting research based on applying sound methodology and data to answer important questions.

In my job market paper, Financial Aid for High-Ability Low-Income Students: The Story of The Texas Top 10% Scholarship Program, I examine the impact of providing financial aid to low-income high school graduates. The returns to college education are large and well documented. However, the benefits of a college degree are not evenly distributed across all students, and the deficits for low-income students are also well documented. In Texas, resident college freshman, with financial need, that graduate in the top decile of their high school class are eligible to receive a $2,000 scholarship at public universities in their first year of college, and the potential of renewal awards through their senior year. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and Texas Legislature set a strict cutoff to determine a student's financial need that is easily calculated from the information collected on Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The probability that a student receives a scholarship increases discontinuously as they cross the eligibility threshold. I use regression discontinuity and exploit the increase in the likelihood of receiving a scholarship to estimate the impact of scholarship receipt on postsecondary education outcomes using a rich set of administrative data. I find that eligible students are more likely to pursue science, technology, engineering, and math majors. This finding is significant considering the large earning premiums associated with many STEM degrees and that low-income students are often underrepresented in STEM.

In Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals (with Julie Berry Cullen, Eric A. Hanushek, and Steven G. Rivkin), we explore the intersection of education policy and public management in the public K-12 school system in Texas. Public schools in Texas were rated, in ascending order, as unacceptable, acceptable, recognized, and exemplary. Campus ratings are linked to financial rewards for good performance, and sanctions for unacceptable ratings. We take advantage of publicly available data from the Texas Education Agency and combine it with restricted, individual-level, administrative data obtained through the Texas Schools project to examine the impact of categorical school accountability systems on principal labor-market outcomes. Underlying these four broad rating categories are continuous measures of student performance with strict cutoffs for each rating. We take advantage of these cutoffs using regression discontinuity analysis and find significant decreases in salary growth and job retention for principals that fall just below the unacceptable-acceptable threshold. However, we do not find any significant differences at the two higher rating thresholds. This finding is consistent with the idea that district administrators use more continuous measures of principal performance, but parents, school boards, and other stakeholders may put additional pressure on an administrator to remove a principal from a school due to the stigma associated with an unacceptable rating. Principals to just to either side of the unacceptable-acceptable threshold are very similar in terms of performance, but the coarse ratings puts unacceptable principals at a severe disadvantage. Moreover, these principals often lead schools serving low-income populations that already have difficulties attracting and retaining effective educators. Our findings highlight the possibility that disseminating information that accurately measures school effectiveness could improve labor market incentives and mitigates disincentives to work in schools serving disadvantaged students.

I have a forthcoming publication in Economica with Patrick Baude, Marcus Casey, Eric Hanushek, and Steven Rivkin where we study the evolution of quality dynamics among Texas charter schools. In other research I examine the growing sector of publicly funded online schools in Texas. My hope is that this research will help schools in this emerging sector provide effective and efficient education specific to the population they serve. Recently, I have began to work on two projects. The first continues to examine the role of leadership public education. I will estimate the quality of school district superintendents and how it relates to the quality of the team of principals they lead. Assembling an effective team of principals is one of the primary channels through which district superintendents affect the quality of schooling. The second project relates to admissions policies and access to state-flagship universities. In Texas the Top 10% rule determines the majority of admission decisions to flagship universities. In 2009, state legislation was passed that allows the University of Austin to be more selective in determining automatic admissions than other state universities. We use these changes in the admission threshold to examine the effect of more stringent requirements on applications, admissions, diversity, and academic performance at the University of Texas at Austin. This project speaks to the ongoing public concerns surrounding the ability of universities to shape their incoming cohorts.

I have been entrepreneurial and gained approval for several projects as both a primary investigator, and a co-primary investigator with colleagues and professors. Access to Texas's administrative data requires approval from a state approval board. Also, the nature of the approval process means that my access to the Texas Schools Project data is independent of my affiliation to the University of Texas at Dallas, and will continue after my graduation. During my time at the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Texas Schools Project, I have worked with large administrative data sources and gained an approach to conducting research that is fungible. I am confident that these skills make me a valuable researcher.