Research on the effectiveness of educational inputs, particularly research on teacher effectiveness, typically overlooks teachers’ potential impact on behavioral outcomes such as student attendance. Using longitudinal data on teachers and students in North Carolina I estimate teacher effects...

Credible evidence from a variety of contexts suggests that student absences harm academic achievement. However, extant studies focus entirely on the average effects of student absences, and how those average effects vary by student, school, and absence type. This paper enhances our understanding...

Student attendance is both a critical input and intermediate output of the education production function. However, the malleable classroom-level determinants of student attendance are poorly understood. We estimate the causal effect of class size and observable teacher qualifications on student...

We examine how disadvantaged students make postsecondary education decisions, focusing on why they often opt for short, flexible programs that tend to have low returns in the labor market. Prior literature emphasizes information deficits and financial constraints. We draw upon qualitative data...

Many male and first-generation college-goers struggle in their first year of postsecondary education. Mentoring programs have been touted as a potential solution to help such students acclimate to college life, yet causal evidence on the impact of such programs, and the factors that influence...

Many male and first-generation college goers struggle in their first year of postsecondary education. Mentoring programs have been touted as a potential solution to help such students acclimate to college life, yet causal evidence on the impact of such programs, and the factors that influence...

Whether or not value-added models should control for contemporaneous student absences is theoretically ambiguous, as such absences are only partly outside of teachers' control. Teachers often feel strongly that value-added models should account for student attendance, and many districts'...

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context...

Student absences are a potentially important, yet understudied, input in the educational process. Using longitudinal data from a nationally-representative survey and rich administrative records from North Carolina, we investigate the relationship between student absences and academic...