RESEARCH

This paper studies the New York City Department of Education's Discovery Program, an affirmative action policy implemented to increase access to some of New York City’s most elite public high schools. The Discovery Program allocates reserve seats at New York City’s exam schools to disadvantaged students who successfully complete the course requirements of a summer program. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and student-level administrative data I estimate the causal impact of exam school admission through the Discovery Program on educational outcomes. I find that while students experience an initial reduction in high school GPA, this negative effect does not persist into later years. Conversely, reserve seat offers increase performance on standardized math test scores. Under a counterfactual school assignment match with no reserve seats, I show that exam school displacement as a result of the Discovery Program has no effect on math scores, but boosts high school GPA. Taken together, these results suggest that the Discovery Program improves outcomes for disadvantaged students, with little to no cost for those displaced by reserve seats.

This paper explores how economic crises affect the teacher labor market. We construct a novel dataset of teachers in Iowa from 1925 through 1940, and link this data to historical census records. This unique dataset allows us to explore churn in the teacher labor market not captured in census data alone. The historical context of Iowa during the Great Depression provides an ideal setting to investigate the impact of economic crises on teacher labor market dynamics. The Great Depression was the largest economic downturn of the twentieth century, creating strain on a public school system that relied heavily on local property taxes. Iowa in particular received over 90 percent of its public school revenue from local district taxes. Using county-level variation in Great Depression severity, we show how economic downturns reshape the supply and composition of the teacher workforce.

Universal school choice, a policy growing in popularity across the U.S., has the potential to break the link between income and public school quality. This paper investigates the impact of Florida's statewide universal school choice policy on the capitalization of public school quality into home prices. Exploiting the policy's statewide rollout in 2023, we use an event study embedded within a border discontinuity design to estimate the effect of universal school choice on the housing market. We find that universal school choice in Florida had no effect on the valuation of public school quality.

We describe a unique environment in which undergraduate students from various STEM and social science disciplines are trained in data provenance and reproducible methods, and then apply that knowledge to real, conditionally accepted manuscripts and associated replication packages. We describe in detail the recruitment, training, and regular activities. While the activity is not part of a regular curriculum, the skills and knowledge taught through explicit training of reproducible methods and principles, and reinforced through repeated application in a real-life workflow, contribute to the education of these undergraduate students, and prepare them for post-graduation jobs and further studies.