We examine the effects that household exposure to housing price declines, captured by measures of negative equity, have on children's academic performance, using data on public school students and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to account for household sorting into neighborhoods and schools and selection into initial mortgage terms. In contrast to the existing literature on the effects of foreclosure, we find that students with the highest risk of negative equity exhibit significantly higher test score growth, with the largest effects among Black students and students qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch. We find evidence supporting two underlying mechanisms: (1) families in negative equity may reduce the impact of income losses on consumption by forgoing mortgage payments, and (2) families exposed to high levels of negative equity may move to schools that received higher average school report card grades. While negative equity and foreclosure are undesirable, negative equity may have encouraged homeowners to forgo mortgage payments to mitigate the impact of the Great Recession, and temporarily reduced the housing market barriers low-income households faced in accessing educational opportunities.

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a school's receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students' reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s. Further examination reveals that our results are consistent with an explanation related to improvements in human capital accumulation.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Cellphone bans in schools have become a popular policy in recent years in the United States, yet very little is known about their effects on student outcomes. In this study, we try to fill this gap by examining the causal effects of bans on student test scores, suspensions, and absences using detailed student-level data from Florida and a quasi-experimental research strategy relying upon differences in pre-ban cellphone use by students, as measured by building-level Advan data. Several important findings emerge. First, we show that the enforcement of cellphone bans in schools led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the short-term, especially among Black students, but disciplinary actions began to dissipate after the first year, potentially suggesting a new steady state after an initial adjustment period. Second, we find significant improvements in student test scores in the second year of the ban after that initial adjustment period. Third, the findings suggest that cellphone bans in schools significantly reduce student unexcused absences, an effect that may explain a large fraction of the test score gains. The effects of cellphone bans are more pronounced in middle and high school settings where student smartphone ownership is more common. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

We study how author connections influence paper outcomes at the Journal of Human Resources. Authors who attended the same PhD program, worked with, affiliate with the same National Bureau of Economic Research program(s), or are closely linked via coauthorship networks as the handling editor are more likely to avoid a desk rejection. Reviewer recommendations are similarly influenced by PhD and employment matches. Matching on signals of ability-such as top five publishing, attending a high-ranked PhD program, or working in a high-ranked department-also impact peer review decisions. We find some evidence that published papers with greater connectivity subsequently receive fewer citations.

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We consistently find that competition stemming from the opening of new charter schools improves reading—but not math—performance and it also decreases absenteeism of students who remain in the TPS. Results are modest in magnitude.

School systems around the world use achievement tests to assign students to schools, classes, and instructional resources, including remediation. Using a regression discontinuity design, we study a Florida policy that places middle school students who score below a proficiency cutoff into remedial classes. Students scoring below the cutoff receive more educational resources, but they are also placed in classes that are more segregated by race, socioeconomic status, and prior achievement. Increased tracking occurs not only in the remedial subject, but in other core subjects. These tracking effects are significantly larger and more likely to persist beyond the year of remediation for Black students. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J15)

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of U.S.-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by the substantial school selection of U.S.-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy, comparing sibling outcomes with the inclusion of family fixed effects, to partial out the unobserved non-random selection of native-born families into schools. We find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not negatively affect the performance of affluent U.S.-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

We use administrative panel data from seven states covering nearly 3 million students to document and explore variation in “academic mobility,” a term we use to describe the extent to which students’ ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their public schooling careers. We find that student ranks are highly persistent during elementary and secondary education—that is, academic mobility is limited in U.S. schools on the whole. Still, there is non-negligible variation in the degree of upward mobility across some student subgroups as well as individual school districts. On average, districts that exhibit the greatest upward academic mobility serve more socioeconomically advantaged populations and have higher value-added to student achievement.

We document that the female advantage in childhood behavioural and academic outcomes is driven by gender gaps at the extremes of the outcome distribution. Using unconditional quantile regression, we show that family socioeconomic status particularly influences boys' relative to girls' outcomes at the lower tails of the outcome distribution, precisely where gender gaps are most pronounced. These relationships are not explained by school or neighbourhood factors, or parents' differential treatment of boys. The disproportionate effect of socioeconomic status on boys at the tails substantially contributes to the gender gap in high school dropout.

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of the target child effect size. The effects are particularly pronounced in families where one of the children is disabled, for boys, and in immigrant families. Candidate mechanisms include improved classroom inputs and parental school choice.

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging a student fixed effects design, we explore how a Florida private school choice program affected public school students' outcomes as the program matured and scaled up. We observe growing benefits (higher standardized test scores and lower absenteeism and suspension rates) to students attending pub-lic schools with more preprogram private school options as the pro-gram matured. Effects are particularly pronounced for lower-income students, but results are positive for more affluent students as well. Local and district-wide private school competition are both inde-pendently related to student outcomes. (JEL H75, I21, I22, I28)

We use unique data from journal submissions to identify and unpack publication bias and p-hacking. We find initial submissions display significant bunching, suggesting the distribution among published statistics cannot be fully attributed to a publication bias in peer review. Desk-rejected manuscripts display greater heaping than those sent for review; i.e., marginally significant results are more likely to be desk rejected. Reviewer recommendations, in contrast, are positively associated with statistical significance. Overall, the peer review process has little effect on the distribution of test statistics. Lastly, we track rejected papers and present evidence that the prevalence of publication biases is perhaps not as prominent as feared. (JEL A11, A14, C13, L82)

We study the correlation between parental gender attitudes and the performance in mathematics of girls using two different approaches and data. First, we identify families with a preference for boys by using fertility stopping rules in a population of households whose children attend public schools in Florida. Girls growing up in a boy-biased family score 3 percentage points lower on math tests when compared to girls raised in other families. Second, we find similar strong effects when we study the correlations between girls' performance in mathematics and maternal gender role attitudes, using evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We conclude that socialization at home can explain a non-trivial part of the observed gender disparities in mathematics performance and document that maternal gender attitudes correlate with those of their children, supporting the hypothesis that preferences transmitted through the family impact children behavior.

This study examines the effects of negative equity on children’s academic performance, using data on children attending Florida public schools and housing transactions from the State of Florida. Our empirical strategy exploits variation over time in the timing of family moves to Florida in order to account for household sorting into neighborhoods and schools and selection into initial mortgage terms. In contrast to the existing literature on foreclosure and children’s outcomes, we find that Florida students with the highest risk of negative equity exhibit significantly higher test score growth. These effects are largest among Black students and students who qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. We find evidence supporting two underlying mechanisms: (1) consumption patterns suggest that families in negative equity may reduce the impact of income losses on consumption by forgoing mortgage payments, and (2) mobility patterns suggest that families exposed to high levels of negative equity may move to schools that are of higher quality on average. While negative equity and foreclosure are undesirable, the changing incentives in terms of mortgage delinquency may have helped families manage the economic shocks caused by the great recession, as well as temporarily reduced the housing market barriers faced by low income households when attempting to access educational opportunities.

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family. Using administrative data on children from both Florida and Denmark, the paper examines the effects of having a disabled younger sibling. To address the identification challenge, the paper compares the differential effects for first- and second-born children in three-plus-child families, taking advantage of the fact that birth order influences the amount of time that a child spends in early childhood with their younger siblings, disabled or not. The paper finds evidence that, relative to the first born, the second child in a family is differentially affected when the third child is disabled.

We examine how students' physiological stress differs between a regular school week and a high-stakes testing week, and we raise questions about how to interpret high-stakes test scores. A potential contributor to socioeconomic disparities in academic performance is the difference in the level of stress experienced by students outside of school. Chronic stress-due to neighborhood violence, poverty, or family instability-can affect how individuals' bodies respond to stressors in general, including the stress of standardized testing. This, in turn, can affect whether performance on standardized tests is a valid measure of students' actual ability. We collect data on students' stress responses using cortisol samples provided by low-income students in New Orleans. We measure how their cortisol patterns change during high-stakes testing weeks relative to baseline weeks. We find that high-stakes testing is related to cortisol responses, and those responses are related to test performance. Those who responded most strongly, with either increases or decreases in cortisol, scored 0.40 standard deviations lower than expected on the high-stakes exam.

We discuss some centrally important decisions faced by colleges and universities regarding how to staff their undergraduate classrooms. We describe the multitasking problem faced by research-intensive institutions and explore the degree to which there may be a trade-off between research and teaching excellence using matched student-faculty-level data from Northwestern University. We present two alternative measures of teaching effectiveness—one capturing “deep learning” and one capturing “inspiration”—and demonstrate that neither is correlated with measures of research success. We discuss the move toward contingent faculty in US universities and show that on average, contingent faculty outperform tenure-line faculty in the introductory classroom, a pattern driven by the lowest-performing instructors according to our measures. We also present some of the ways in which instructor gender, race, and ethnicity might matter. Together, these pieces of evidence show that several institutional objectives associated with staffing undergraduate classrooms may be in tension with one another.

Previous research has shown that norms around the role of women in society could help explain the gender gap in mathematics and that these norms could be transmitted within the family. Using data from the Florida Department of Education combined with birth certificates we uncover important heterogeneity in the transmission of gender biases within the family. We find that gender role norms can explain the lower performance of girls in mathematics only in relatively affluent White families, whereas they do not apparently matter for the performance of Black girls.

We use linked birth and education records for all children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002 to assess the effects of neonatal health on the identification of childhood disabilities. We find that several measures of neonatal health are associated with disability incidence, although birth weight plays the most empirically relevant role. Using large samples of siblings and twins, we find that infant health influences multiple measures of disability and grade repetition in school. The association between birth weight and disability holds throughout the distribution of birth weight and across a range of socioeconomic characteristics, including maternal education and race.