Using the recession recovery point equal to the month when private payrolls first exceeded their previous peak level, this paper argues that it was the negative secular trend in manufacturing jobs that was the most important determinant of the length and depth of the last three...

Graphs that allow side by side comparisons of the six longer US expansions since 1950 suggest that these expansions have four distinct phases: (1) a high growth recovery during which the rate of unemployment declines to its pre-recession level, (2) a modest growth plateau during which the rate...

Educators and policymakers have been concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to substantial delays in learning due to disruptions, anxiety, and remote schooling. We study student achievement patterns over the pandemic using a combination of state summative and higher frequency benchmark...

The success of many students with disabilities (SWDs) depends on access to high-quality general education teachers. Yet, most measures of teacher value-added measures (VAM) fail to distinguish between a teacher's effectiveness in educating students with and without disabilities. We create two...

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...

We use data from Michigan and an interrupted time series (ITS) strategy to show how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted new special education classifications and discontinuations. We find a substantial decrease in K-5 classifications and discontinuations during the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years....