Research on human capital, education, labor markets, and public policy.

Using court-mandated school finance reforms as plausibly exogenous shifts in spending, this paper shows that sustained increases in per-pupil spending raise educational attainment and adult wages and reduce adult poverty, with especially large effects for children from low-income families.

This paper shows that early-childhood and K–12 investments are dynamically complementary: the gains from Head Start are larger when children later attend better-funded schools, and the returns to school spending are larger for children who previously had access to Head Start.

A synthesis of the modern design-based literature on school spending, highlighting why newer causal evidence finds meaningful effects of school resources on student outcomes and how it differs from earlier observational studies.

Reviewing causal evidence from U.S. school-spending interventions, the paper summarizes what kinds of educational and long-run improvements policymakers can expect from additional school resources.

Exploiting recession-driven reductions in school spending, this paper finds that spending cuts harmed student achievement and educational attainment, especially in places that experienced larger fiscal shocks.

A nontechnical summary of the school-finance-reform evidence showing that greater K–12 spending can increase completed education and adult earnings, particularly for disadvantaged children.

A concise overview arguing that the best recent evidence shows school funding matters for students and that the central policy question is how to spend resources most effectively rather than whether money matters at all.

This working paper links school finance reforms to more equitable spending distributions and presents evidence that those reforms improved both student achievement and later-life outcomes.

By linking design-based micro evidence to aggregate state outcomes, the paper provides causal evidence that investments in schools generate macroeconomic effects, raising aggregate earnings, personal income, and GDP as better-educated cohorts enter the labor market.

This paper shows that teachers affect important student outcomes beyond test scores—such as attendance, suspensions, grades, and grade progression—and that these broader teacher effects predict long-run student success.

Using within-school variation in colleagues, the paper shows that teachers learn from one another and become more effective when they work alongside stronger peers.

The paper provides direct evidence that worker productivity depends not just on worker skill and employer quality separately, but also on the quality of the match between the two.

A review of evidence on teacher value-added, what teacher-effect estimates capture, and how those findings bear on policy choices involving recruitment, evaluation, and compensation.

This paper shows that changes in student composition can alter how teachers sort across schools, with consequences for the distribution of teacher quality.

The paper demonstrates that measuring high-school teacher effects requires accounting for course tracks and student sorting; once that is done, teacher quality matters greatly for student outcomes.

Using charter-school entry as a source of competition, the paper studies how traditional public schools adjust teacher labor-market outcomes and staffing patterns in response.

An accessible overview of the evidence on how schools can improve teacher quality through recruitment, retention, professional development, and workplace design.

This article argues that teacher evaluation should incorporate broader behavioral and noncognitive outcomes because value-added based only on test scores misses important dimensions of teacher effectiveness.

The paper shows that school quality is multidimensional—schools affect test scores, attainment, and behavior in different ways—and that parent demand reflects several of these dimensions rather than test scores alone.

Using rule-based secondary-school assignments, the paper estimates the causal effects of attending more effective schools on student achievement and later educational outcomes.

Exploiting assignment rules, this paper studies the causal effects of single-sex schooling on academic achievement and students’ subsequent course choices.

This paper shows that schools influence socioemotional development and school-based arrests as well as later educational attainment, underscoring that school quality extends well beyond test-score effects.

The paper decomposes the benefits of selective-school attendance and shows that higher-achieving peers alone cannot fully explain the gains from attending better schools.

This paper examines whether attending schools that parents prefer affects short-run academic outcomes and longer-run educational attainment.

The paper studies whether creating single-sex schooling environments within low-performing schools improves academic outcomes and reduces risky behavior and teen motherhood.

This paper identifies which students gain the most from attending highly effective high schools and highlights heterogeneity in the returns to school quality.

Using exogenous school assignments and the COVID-19 downturn, the paper examines whether better education protects workers against job loss during negative economic shocks.

This working paper studies whether universal pre-K increases parental labor supply and aggregate earnings, framing early-childhood expansion as both social policy and economic stimulus.

This paper studies when decentralization improves school performance, emphasizing the roles of local leadership quality and alignment with local needs.

Evaluating a Texas AP incentive program, the paper finds that financial incentives and academic supports can increase AP participation and performance and improve college-going outcomes.

Using the New York City taxi market, the paper shows that social ties between owners and drivers can mitigate moral hazard when contracts are incomplete.

This paper studies whether expanded late-night public transit reduces drunk driving, finding small average effects but meaningful local changes in drinking-related behavior near transit and bars.

A field experiment shows that checklists can raise worker productivity, especially when their use is monitored, by serving as both a memory aid and a monitoring technology.

This paper finds that a college-preparatory program combining incentives and supports improved college persistence and adult earnings, with especially large gains for Hispanic students.

A short Education Next article summarizing evidence that rewarding AP success can increase rigorous-course participation and improve students’ later educational outcomes.

This paper evaluates a major financial-aid reform at Harvard and examines how reducing cost barriers affects students’ application and enrollment behavior.