While a large literature examines the immediate and long-run effects of public health insurance, much less is known about the impacts of total program exposure on child developmental outcomes. This paper uses an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the effect of cumulative eligibility gain...

In this paper, I develop a measure of host country experience, which I call "relative time of arrival," to explore differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. This measure is finer than immigrant generation and expands on the widely used measures of years since migration and age...

This paper studies the impacts of withdrawing from and failing a course, relative to successful completion, on persistence for community college students. We leverage random assignment of students to instructors for identification. Withdrawing from a course reduces the probability of persistence...

Disruptions in family life can take many forms, but all have the potential to impact student learning. With school administrative data matched to birth records, I estimate the effect of unexpected changes in the home environment, or family shocks, on achievement. Identification comes from...

Past research has shown that Hispanic students make test score gains relative to whites as they age through school; however, this finding stands in contrast to the experience of blacks, who show little change in their relative position over the same time frame. Distinguishing Hispanic students...

New technologies offer many promises to improve student learning, but efforts to bring them to the classroom often fail to produce improvements to student outcomes. A notable exception to this pattern is one-to-one laptop programs. While early evaluations of these programs have been encouraging,...

In this paper, we study the evolution of cognitive and noncognitive skills gaps for children of immigrants between kindergarten and 5th grade. We find some evidence that children of immigrants begin school with lower math scores than children of natives, but this gap disappears in later...