We use student assignment lotteries to estimate the effect of charter school attendance on student achievement in Boston. We also evaluate a related alternative, Boston's pilot schools. Pilot schools have some of the independence of charter schools but are in the Boston Public School district...

One long-standing motivation for low-income housing programs is the possibility that housing affordability and housing conditions generate externalities, including on children’s behavior and long-term life outcomes. We take advantage of a randomized housing voucher lottery in Chicago in 1997...

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention generated by a test-based promotion policy to...

This paper examines revealed preferences of parents for their children's education, using parent requests for individual elementary school teachers and information on teacher attributes, including principal reports of teacher characteristics that are typically unobservable. On average, parents...

We develop an algorithm for detecting teacher cheating that combines information on unexpected test score fluctuations and suspicious patterns of answers for students in a classroom. Using data from the Chicago public schools, we estimate that serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating...