This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted 2000-2018 Census-ACS data linked to the SSA’s Numident file, which contains exact date and county of birth. Using the county rollout of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, the study finds that , including a 0.65-year increase in schooling, a 2.7-percent increase in high
Incentives, Resources, and Virtuous Circles: Around 1875 the U.S. had none of the world’s leading research universities; today, it accounts for the majority of the top-ranked. Many observers cite events surrounding World War II as the source of this reversal. This study presents evidence that U.S. research universities had surpassed most countries’ decades before WWII. An explanation of their dom
What are the effects of school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic on children's education? Online education is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families. Peer effects also change: schools allow children from different socio-economic backgrounds to mix together, and this effect is lost when schools are closed. Another factor is the respon
This study leverages insights from sociology to explore the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age by estimating the spillover effects from a large-scale early childhood intervention on the educational attainment of over 2,000 disadvantaged children in the United States. The study documents large spillover effects on both treatment and control children who live near trea
The Top 10% Plan admissions policy has now been in place in Texas for over two decades. This study analyzes 18 years of post-Top 10% Plan data to look for evidence of increased access to the selective Texas flagship campuses among all Texas high schools, providing a detailed description of changes in enrollment patterns at the flagship campuses from Texas high schools after the implementation of
This is the first national study of the causal impact of school spending and local taxes on housing prices by pairing variation induced by school finance reforms with 25 years of national data on housing prices. The analysis speaks to two classic questions in economics: whether school spending matters and whether it is provided at efficient levels. The results indicate that households highly valu
This study uses field experiments with nearly 900 children to investigate how skills developed at ages 3-5 drive later-life outcomes. The researchers find that skills map onto three distinct factors - cognitive skills, executive functions, and economic preferences. Returning to the children up to 7 years later, they find that executive functions, but not cognitive skills, predict the likelihood o
Five years into the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states are doing a wildly varied job of serving vulnerable students and closing persistent gaps required by the law, new analyses from the Alliance for Excellent Education (All4Ed) show. With the Biden administration taking office ne
