We develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy's marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy. We apply this method to characterize the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers who raise students' test scores improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school...

Are teachersʼ impacts on studentsʼ test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachersʼ causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias...

We develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy's marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy. We apply this method to characterize the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on...

In this paper, we examine what groups of children are served by core childhood social-safety net programs—including Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and AFDC/TANF—and how that's changed over time. We find that virtually all gains in spending on the social safety net for children since 1990 have...

President Obama's "Preschool for All" initiative calls for dramatic increases in the number of 4 year olds enrolled in public preschool programs and in the quality of these programs nationwide. The proposed program shares many characteristics with the universal preschools that have been offered...