Research

Working Papers

The Effects of Teacher Quality on Adult Criminal Justice Contact (with Evan K. Rose and Yotam Shem-Tov), under review

This paper investigates the impact of teacher quality on future criminal behavior. Using a unique data set linking the universe of public school records to administrative criminal justice records for the state of North Carolina, we demonstrate strong associations between future criminal activity and early life education outcomes including test scores, attendance, and disciplinary records. We estimate value-added models measuring the causal impacts of teachers on short-run cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes in a multivariate random effects framework, and link these short-run effects to teacher effects on adult crime. We find that teachers primarily influence future crime through a non-cognitive channel, and that their cognitive and non-cognitive impacts are orthogonal. This result implies that test score-based measures miss an important component of the social value of teacher quality, suggesting scope for improved teacher assessment systems that also account for non-cognitive gains.

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness? (with Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Christopher R. Walters), American Economic Review 110(5), 2020.

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’ choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City’s centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants’ rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality.