This study examines the short-run impact of a weakening of teachers' unions on student achievement. In 2011, Wisconsin enacted the Budget Repair Bill, or Act 10, which significantly limited the power of teachers' unions in the state by restricting their fundraising abilities and limiting the...

Foster care placement is strongly associated with crime--for example, close to one fifth of the prison population in the United States is comprised of former foster children--yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of child...

This paper asks whether improving the quality of public schools can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of school quality improvements early in children's lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit...

Roughly one in four juveniles arrested in the U.S. spend time in a detention center prior to their court date. To study the consequences of this practice for youth, we link the universe of individual public school records in Michigan to juvenile and adult criminal justice records. Using a...

This study examines the impact of school spending on student outcomes. State-imposed revenue limits cap the total amount of revenue that a school district in Wisconsin can raise, unless the district holds a local referendum asking voters to exceed the cap. Importantly, Wisconsin law requires...

This study examines the impact of performance pay on teacher selection. I exploit a shift toward performance pay in Wisconsin induced by the enactment of Act 10, which gave school districts autonomy to redesign their compensation schemes. Following the law, half of Wisconsin school districts...

Six percent of children in the United States enter foster care by age 18. We estimate the effects of foster care on children’s outcomes by exploiting the quasi-random assignment of child welfare investigators in Michigan. We find that foster care improved children’s safety and educational...