Research

Job market paper

Student Preferences and Horizontal Differentiation in Urban School Choice Markets. Draft

An understudied component of the district-level education production function is the degree of curricular differentiation across schools. Many urban school districts in the United States offer some degree of choice and curricular differentiation, allowing families to choose among schools with different curricular themes (e.g., arts or science). In this paper, I investigate the impact of curricular themes on segregation, student welfare, and student outcomes in New York City high schools. I estimate a structural model using data on student applications to determine how students trade off curricular themes and other school characteristics in the application process. I find on average that all demographic groups, but particularly white and Asian applicants, prefer Humanities and Interdisciplinary programs, the most general curricular theme, to more specialized themes. Using the model to compare the baseline assignment to a simulated counterfactual assignment in which all programs are Humanities and Interdisciplinary, I find that curricular differentiation slightly increases segregation by race, income, and achievement across high school programs. While on average, students prefer their counterfactual assignment, a substantial minority of applicants, including about half of all Black applicants, would be worse off without curricular differentiation. Finally, I use quasi-experimental variation generated by the assignment mechanism to estimate theme enrollment effects on student outcomes. I find that theme matters for high school outcomes and postsecondary choice, but effects do not vary by theme preference, suggesting limited scope for themes to improve student-school match quality.

Publications

The Power of Certainty: Experimental Evidence on the Effective Design of Free Tuition Programs (with Elizabeth Burland, Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen). Published in American Economic Review: Insights.

Proposed “free college” policies vary widely in design. The simplest set tuition to zero for everyone. More targeted approaches limit free tuition to those who demonstrate need through an application process. We experimentally test the effects of these two models on the schooling decisions of low-income students. An unconditional free tuition offer from a large public university substantially increases application and enrollment rates. A free tuition offer contingent on proof of need has a much smaller effect on application and none on enrollment. These results are consistent with students placing a high value on financial certainty when making schooling decisions.

Works in progress

The Distributional Effects of State Investments in Less-Selective Public Colleges (with John Bound, Soyoung Han, and Andrew Simon)

We study the effects of targeted state investments in less-selective public universities. We consider a performance-based funding reform in Michigan that steeply increased appropriations for non-research-intensive institutions compared to others, while limiting tuition growth. Using administrative data linking all Michigan public high-school graduates to their postsecondary outcomes, we implement a difference-in-differences design comparing enrollment and graduation across institution types before and after the reform. The policy raised the share of high school graduates who enroll in non-R1 universities by about 0.2 percentage points (∼2300 students) per year and increased graduation by roughly half of this amount. We find that the effects are concentrated among higher-income and non-URM students. Finally, we use university-level data from IPEDS and student survey data from the NCES to consider how demand and supply side responses lead to these patterns across students.

Multidimensional Impacts of High School Teachers on Students (with Maria Knoth Humlum and Helena Skyt Nielsen)