We use simple economic insights to develop a framework for distinguishing between prejudice and statistical discrimination using observational data. We focus our inquiry on the enormous literature in healthcare where treatment disparities by race and gender are not explained by access,...

The evidence that productivity varies greatly across teachers has given rise to the idea that student achievement data should be included in performance evaluation, despite limited empirical evidence on subjective evaluation or the use of objective performance measures in U.S. public schools. In...

We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school. Using rich administrative data on peers,...

Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score...

This paper uses data from the implementation of a district-wide public school choice plan in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to estimate preferences for school characteristics and examine their implications for the local educational market. We use parental rankings of their top three choices...

There are three primary measures of teaching performance: student test-based measures (i.e., value added), classroom observations, and student surveys. Although all three types of measures could be biased by unmeasured traits of the students in teachers' classrooms, prior research has largely...

In medicine, the reasons for variation in treatment rates across hospitals serving similar patients are not well understood. Some interpret this variation as unwarranted, and push standardization of care as a way of reducing allocative inefficiency. An alternative interpretation is that...

In 2011-12, Newark launched a set of educational reforms supported by a gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Using data from 2009 through 2016, we evaluate the change in Newark students' achievement growth relative to similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey. We...

Research on the relationship between teachers' characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. However, most research has examined a relatively small set of...

We use six years of data on student test performance to evaluate the effectiveness of certified, uncertified, and alternatively certified teachers in the New York City public schools. On average, the certification status of a teacher has at most small impacts on student test performance....