This paper examines the daily labor supply of a potentially important, but often overlooked, source of instruction in U.S. public schools: substitute teachers. I estimate a sequential binary-choice model of substitute teachers’ job-offer acceptance decisions using data on job offers made by a...

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title 1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the...

We develop and estimate a joint model of the education and teacher-expectation production functions that identifies both the distribution of biases in teacher expectations and the impact of those biases on student outcomes via self-fulfilling prophecies. The identification strategy leverages...

Black primary-school students matched to a same-race teacher perform better on standardized tests and face more favorable teacher perceptions, yet little is known about the long-run, sustained impacts of student-teacher demographic match. We show that assigning a black male to a black teacher in...

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title-1 schools that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the...

Recent research exploits a variety of natural experiments that create exogenous variation in annual school days to estimate the average effect of formal schooling on students' academic achievement. However, the extant literature's focus on average effects masks potentially important variation in...

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title 1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the...

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...

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'...

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...