Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson led a Midwestern policy revolution in the late 1980s and early 1990s centered on providing parents with more school choices. Since those early years, school choice in the forms of private school vouchers, public charter schools, and public school open enrollment...

Two highly controversial issues in the field of K-12 education in the U.S. are special education and parental school choice. Those two policy concerns converge surrounding the question of what proportion of students in school voucher programs compared to public schools have education-related...

Has access to selective post-secondary schools expanded or contracted? Evaluating this question has proven a difficult task due to limited data and biased measures of family income. We complement previous work and provide a replicable model of institutional analysis. This paper presents a...

Drawing on a unique data set that links information on all Wisconsin households receiving means-tested benefits with the educational performance of all Wisconsin public school students in these households, we estimate the effect of a family's initial receipt of housing assistance on students'...

In this pre-registered study, we analyze the effects of need-based financial aid grant offers on the educational outcomes of low-income college students based on a large-scale randomized experiment (n=48,804). We find evidence that the grant offers increase two-year persistence by 1.7 percentage...

In this paper, we leverage the random assignment of a need-based financial aid grant offer—the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars (FFWS) grant—and several sets of administrative records to provide experimental evidence on the effects of the grant offer on students’ in-state employment and...

This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher ( Section 8) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and...