Abstract: An ongoing debate in both academic and policy circles focuses on how board members’ demographic and professional backgrounds—i.e., their identities—shape organizational outcomes, often with the idea that members’ policy viewpoints—i.e., their ideologies—vary across these groups. In this paper, we look directly at whether and how board members’ ideologies affect outcomes for organizations. We combine data on the policy priorities of school board candidates in California with records of election outcomes, debate in board meetings, and policy outcomes for school districts to trace the causal path from viewpoints to debate to policy change using a regression discontinuity design. Our analysis yields two central findings. First, board members succeed in implementing their stated policy agendas, with a mean effect of 0.16σ (95% CI=[0.14, 0.19]) across all tested policy domains. Members shift policy through the budget process and through changes in executive leadership; we see in data on meeting minutes that they do so both by casting pivotal votes on controversial measures and by changing the kinds of measures the board votes on. Second, direct observation of ideology is crucial for understanding the importance of board composition. Identity turns out to be a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained by differences in policy priorities.

EC'2022 Proceedings

Abstract: We study the dynamic relationship of school choices across different educational stages. Using quasi-random middle school assignments in New York City, we show that middle schools with top quality-review scores cause students to be matched to higher-achievement high schools, in both level and value-added. A decomposition exercise using a sequential model of middle and high school choices shows that such effects of middle schools mainly operate by affecting students’ high school applications rather than high school priorities, accounting for nearly 80% of the total effect. By mainly changing students’ high school applications, abolishing eligibility restrictions of top quality-review-scored middle schools can not only increase the average quality of attended high schools but also narrow the racial and income disparities in it. Such efficiency and equity gains increase by up to 50% when combined with similar high school admissions reforms. 

EC'2023 Proceedings

Abstract: We explore the impact of public school assignment reforms by building a households’ school choice model with two key features---(1) endogenous residential location choice and (2) opt-out to outside schooling options. Households decide where to live taking into account that locations determine access to schools---admissions probabilities and commuting distances to schools. Households are heterogeneous both in observed and unobserved characteristics. We estimate the model using administrative data from New York City's middle school choice system. Variation from a boundary discontinuity design separately identifies access-to-school preferences from other location amenities. Residential sorting based on access-to-school preference explains 30% of the gap in test scores of schools attended by minority students versus their peers. If households' residential locations were fixed, a reform that introduces purely lottery-based admissions to schools in lower- and mid-Manhattan would reduce the cross-racial gap by 7%. However, households’ endogenous location choices dampen the effect by half. 

Abstract: The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 established a new program called Opportunity Zones (OZs) that reduces or eliminates capital gains taxes on investment in a limited number of low-income Census tracts. We provide a model illustrating how a change in capital taxation affects employment in existing and new establishments. We then use establishment-level data to show that, in its first two years, the OZ designation increased employment growth relative to comparable tracts by between 3.0 and 4.5 percentage points in metropolitan areas. The job growth occurred in multiple industries and persisted into 2021 rather than quickly disappearing. However, most of the jobs created by the program were likely taken by residents that live outside of the designated tracts, consistent with only 5% of US residents working in the same Census tract as the one in which they live. 

Abstract: We study how colleges' ``sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and freezes using a modified event study design. While tuition regulations lower sticker prices, colleges recoup losses by lowering financial aid or rapidly increasing tuition after regulations end. At four-year colleges, regulations lower sticker price by 6.3 percentage points while simultaneously reducing aid by nearly twice as much (11.3 percentage points). At two-year colleges, while regulations lower tuition by 9.3 percentage points, the effect disappears within three years of the end of the regulation. Changes in net tuition vary widely; focusing on four-year colleges, while some students receive discounts up to 5.9 percentage points, others pay 3.8 percentage points more than they would have without these regulations. Students who receive financial aid, enter college right after the regulation is lifted, or attend colleges that are more dependent on tuition benefit less.

Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of a student-centered teaching pedagogy program by a local education authority on cooperative behaviors of 610 students in five middle schools. We measure changes of students’ cooperation with lab-in-the-field experiments, implemented before and after the program. Relying on a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that the program has a positive effect on cooperation in a linear public goods experiment by way of remediating a negative time trend of contribution. Our findings support the idea that teaching practices stimulating interpersonal interaction affect the formation of cooperative norms among students.