Working Papers

The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students' Educational and Labor Market Outcomes  [Job Market Paper] Revise & Resubmit AEJ: Economic Policy

Recognized as One of the Five Best Education Research Studies of 2024 by Fordham Institute 

pdf | SSRN | EdWorkingPapers

Media Coverage: EducationWeek

Presented at: Stanford Graduate School of Education, Memorial Conference for Dr. Rodney Andrews, SOLE 2024, PAA 2024,  APPAM 2023, Texas Stata Conference 2023, Texas Camp Econometrics 2023

Abstract: Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25–27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.

The Racial Gap in Friendships Among High-Achieving Students

with Weonhyeok Chung

pdf | EdWorkingPapers

Abstract: High-achieving minority students have fewer friends than their majority counterparts. Exploring patterns of friendship formation in the Add Health data, we find strong racial homophily in friendship formations as well as strong achievement homophily within race. However, we find that achievement matters less in cross-racial friendships.  As a result, high-achieving Black students lose Black friends as they move away from the mean achievement of their group, but do not gain high-achieving White friends in offsetting fashion. We find that high-achieving Black students have fewer friends, mainly due to the fact that they are exposed to fewer high-achieving peers within their own race. Estimating causal returns to friendship, we find that this could account for as much as 5–9 percentage points (16-33%) of the racial earnings gap observed among high achievers.

From Population Growth to Demographic Scarcity: Emerging Challenges to Global Primary Education Provision in the Twenty-first Century 

with Emily Hannum and Fan Wang

pdf| EdWorkingPapers

Abstract: Demographic pressures are shaping challenges to educational provision in fundamental and disparate ways around the world.  In some societies, ever-increasing child cohort sizes continue to exerted expansionary pressures. In many others, a regime of declining, sparse child cohorts has eased those pressures, but presents new challenges as systems must navigate geospatial complexities to downsize. In this paper, we demonstrate first that recent demographic trends constitute a highly dis-equalizing force on primary educational provision globally, with persistent expansionary pressures affecting almost exclusively some of the world's least-resourced educational systems. Second, where demographic decline has countered expansionary pressures, we demonstrate significant variation in national educational responses to demographic scarcity.  Finally, focusing on Korea, the country at the forefront of ultra-low fertility, we illustrate the emergence of new forms of spatial educational inequalities in the context of depopulation.  We argue that the implications of demographic pressures for achieving policy goals related to educational access and quality, the presence or absence of migration as a mitigating or exacerbating factor, and the nature of educational policy responses constitute essential yet neglected research agendas in the demography of education.  

Low Psychic Costs of Education for Women and the Gender Wage Gap

 pdf| SSRN

Abstract: In recent years, women have surpassed men in terms of schooling, leading some researchers to propose that women may have lower psychic costs of attending school. To understand the implications of this, I incorporate psychic costs explicitly into the Becker model of human capital. The model generates predictions about differential sorting into college and gender gaps in skills, education, and wages, which I investigate with data from the NLSY97. I find that women have lower psychic costs—measured by behavioral misdemeanors—which explains one-third of the gender college attainment gap. While women in the population have higher cognitive skills, this is reversed when controlling for educational level because of the differential education sorting. Given that the returns to cognitive skills are higher than the returns to good behavior in the labor market, I find that accounting for skill mix explains 7–12 percent of the gender wage gap among the college-educated in the NLSY97.  The findings highlight the potential problems associated with gender comparisons at the same educational level, particularly when various skills are not available.

Neighborhood Impacts on STEM Choice [Texas ERC Project # UH 80] 

Abstract: I show that the neighborhoods where students grow up significantly influence their choice of STEM by using variation in the grades at which students move across districts and counties in Texas. Students moving to high STEM areas—measured by the proportion of non-moving students obtaining a STEM degree—show a linear increase in their probability of selecting a STEM major with the time spent in the new place. To distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors, I exploit sharp variations in predicted neighborhood effects across school cohorts, genders, races, and specific college majors. The tests also suggest that the observed exposure effects are not merely due to an overall improvement in educational attainment. Importantly, I find that the STEM exposure measure is strongly tied to occupational composition. Lastly, I find that the positive effects extend to students from both disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged families.