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School Equalization in the Shadow of Jim Crow: Causes and Consequences of Resource Disparity in Mississippi circa 1940
May 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-25
A school finance equalization program established in Mississippi in 1920 failed to help many of the state's Black students'an outcome that was typical in the segregated U.S. South (Horace Mann Bond, 1934). In majority-Black school districts, local decision-makers overwhelmingly favored white schools when allotting funds from the state's preexisting per capita fund, and the resulting high expenditures on white students rendered these districts ineligible for the equalization program. Thus, while Black students residing in majority-white districts benefitted from increased spending and standards for Black schools, those in majority-Black districts continued to experience extremely low'and even worsening'school funding. We model the processes that led the so-called equalization policy to create disparities in schooling resources for Black students, and estimate effects on Black children using both a neighboring-counties design and an IV strategy. We find that local educational spending had large impacts on Black enrollment rates, as reported in the 1940 census, with Black educational attainment increasing in marginal spending. Finally, we link the 1940 and 2000 censuses to show that Black children exposed to higher levels of school expenditures had significantly more completed schooling and higher income late in life.
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Scientific Talent Leaks Out of Funding Gaps
February 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-08
We study how delays in NIH grant funding affect the career outcomes of research personnel. Using comprehensive earnings and tax records linked to university transaction data along with a difference-in-differences design, we find that a funding interruption of more than 30 days has a substantial effect on job placements for personnel who work in labs with a single NIH R01 research grant, including a 3 percentage point (40%) increase in the probability of not working in the US. Incorporating information from the full 2020 Decennial Census and data on publications, we find that about half of those induced into nonemployment appear to permanently leave the US and are 90% less likely to publish in a given year, with even larger impacts for trainees (postdocs and graduate students). Among personnel who continue to work in the US, we find that interrupted personnel earn 20% less than their continuously-funded peers, with the largest declines concentrated among trainees and other non-faculty personnel (such as staff and undergraduates). Overall, funding delays account for about 5% of US nonemployment in our data, indicating that they have a meaningful effect on the scientific labor force at the national level.
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A Tale of Two Fields? STEM Career Outcomes
October 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-53
Is the labor market for US researchers experiencing the best or worst of times? This paper analyzes the market for recently minted Ph.D. recipients using supply-and-demand logic and data linking graduate students to their dissertations and W2 tax records. We also construct a new dissertation-industry 'relevance' measure, comparing dissertation and patent text and linking patents to assignee firms and industries. We find large disparities across research fields in placement (faculty, postdoc, and industry positions), earnings, and the use of specialized human capital. Thus, it appears to simultaneously be a good time for some fields and a bad time for others.
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Virtual Charter Students Have Worse Labor Market Outcomes as Young Adults
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-32
Virtual charter schools are increasingly popular, yet there is no research on the long-term outcomes of virtual charter students. We link statewide education records from Oregon with earnings information from IRS records housed at the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on how virtual charter students fare as young adults. Virtual charter students have substantially worse high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates, bachelor's degree attainment, employment rates, and earnings than students in traditional public schools. Although there is growing demand for virtual charter schools, our results suggest that students who enroll in virtual charters may face negative long-term consequences.
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Measuring School Economic Disadvantage
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-50R
Many educational policies hinge on the valid measurement of student economic disadvantage at the school level. Measures based on free and reduced-price lunch enrollment are used widely. However, recent research raises questions about their reliability, particularly following the introduction of universal free lunch in certain schools and districts. Using unique data linking the universe of students in Oregon public schools to IRS tax records and other data housed at the U.S. Census Bureau, we provide the first examination of how well different measures capture school economic disadvantage. We find that, in Oregon, direct certification provides the best widely-available measure, both over time and across the distribution of school economic disadvantage. By contrast, neighborhood-based measures consistently perform relatively poorly.
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Using Small-Area Estimation (SAE) to Estimate Prevalence of Child Health Outcomes at the Census Regional-, State-, and County-Levels
November 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-48
In this study, we implement small-area estimation to assess the prevalence of child health outcomes at the county, state, and regional levels, using national survey data.
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Measuring Race in US Economic Statistics: What Do We Know?
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-30
This article is an edited transcript of the session of the same name at the 38th Annual NABE Economic Policy Conference: Policy Options for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. The panelists are experts from government and private research organizations.
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Improving Estimates of Neighborhood Change with Constant Tract Boundaries
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-16
Social scientists routinely rely on methods of interpolation to adjust available data to their research needs. This study calls attention to the potential for substantial error in efforts to harmonize data to constant boundaries using standard approaches to areal and population interpolation. We compare estimates from a standard source (the Longitudinal Tract Data Base) to true values calculated by re-aggregating original 2000 census microdata to 2010 tract areas. We then demonstrate an alternative approach that allows the re-aggregated values to be publicly disclosed, using 'differential privacy' (DP) methods to inject random noise to protect confidentiality of the raw data. The DP estimates are considerably more accurate than the interpolated estimates. We also examine conditions under which interpolation is more susceptible to error. This study reveals cause for greater caution in the use of interpolated estimates from any source. Until and unless DP estimates can be publicly disclosed for a wide range of variables and years, research on neighborhood change should routinely examine data for signs of estimation error that may be substantial in a large share of tracts that experienced complex boundary changes.
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The Color of Money: Federal vs. Industry Funding of University Research
September 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-26
U.S. universities, which are important producers of new knowledge, have experienced a shift in research funding away from federal and towards private industry sources. This paper compares the effects of federal and private university research funding, using data from 22 universities that include individual-level payments for everyone employed on all grants for each university year and that are linked to patent and Census data, including IRS W-2 records. We instrument for an individual's source of funding with government-wide R&D expenditure shocks within a narrow field of study. We find that a higher share of federal funding causes fewer but more general patents, more high-tech entrepreneurship, a higher likelihood of remaining employed in academia, and a lower likelihood of joining an incumbent firm. Increasing the private share of funding has opposite effects for most outcomes. It appears that private funding leads to greater appropriation of intellectual property by incumbent firms.
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Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility Across the 20th Century
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-20
During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have 'leapfrogged' or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.
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