Traditional economic theory suggests that the benefits of place-based public investments, such as environmental cleanups and public-school improvements, accrue largely to nearby property owners. But a substantial share of disadvantaged households near these investments are renters. This raises concerns that these improvements will harm the most disadvantaged, for instance by displacing them from their communities. I examine how dynamic preference evolution could overturn this traditional view. I illustrate my argument using a two-period choice model. I then conduct descriptive analyses of households near Superfund sites and School Improvement Grant awardees, and a national difference-in-differences analysis. I find no evidence that these programs cause renter displacement, which suggests limited negative welfare effects on renters.
We examine the effects of accelerated math on students' self-efficacy and growth mindset, using survey measures of these beliefs. We argue, based on economic theory, that effects on growth mindset should be considered as more important relative to those on self-efficacy. We examine the effects of accelerated math empirically using a difference-in-differences design and find negative effects on both belief measures. However, the effects on growth mindset are much smaller, and in some analyses indistinguishable from zero, although these effects are larger in magnitude for female students. In exploring potential mechanisms, we find accelerated math leads to a precipitous drop in math course grades, with no similar drop in math test performance. Our findings suggest that there may be negative effects of acceleration on important student beliefs, but these effects appear modest.
We study how athletic participation relates to two measures of engagement, school attendance and disciplinary suspension, among students in an urban school district. We study within‐student variation, comparing the same student when playing sports versus not. We contribute a microeconomic model to better interpret estimates obtained using such variation, and we propose and employ novel instrumental variables based on lagged season‐specific sports choices and the sports‐specific participation trajectories of other students. Our most rigorous models suggest positive effects of athletics on student attendance, but no significant effects on disciplinary suspension.
Do grade configurations affect student academic performance? To bring new evidence to this question, I use recent district-by-grade data for nearly the entire United States that contain measures of test score achievement and rates of school switching induced by grade configuration. Past research has found that student performance, is, on average, relatively low following switches due to grade configuration, but in fact students perform relatively better in the grades just prior to these switches. In the national data, I find that this so-called top dog/bottom dog pattern appears for all terminal grade choices among grades 3 through 8, is geographically widespread, and is robust to controlling for grade-specific effects of a rich set of covariates.