We use admis­sions lot­ter­ies to esti­mate the effects of large-scale pub­lic preschool in Boston on col­lege-going, col­lege prepa­ra­tion, stan­dard­ized test scores, and behav­ioral out­comes. Preschool enroll­ment boosts col­lege atten­dance, as well as SAT test-tak­ing and high school grad­u­a­tion. Preschool also decreas­es sev­er­al dis­ci­pli­nary mea­sures includ­ing juve­nile incar­cer­a­tion, but has no detectable impact on state achievement […]

Many large urban school dis­tricts match stu­dents to schools using algo­rithms that incor­po­rate an ele­ment of ran­dom assign­ment. We intro­duce two sim­ple empir­i­cal strate­gies to har­ness this ran­dom­iza­tion for mea­sur­ing the causal effects of indi­vid­ual schools. In appli­ca­tions to data from Denver and New York City, we find that our mod­els yield high­ly reli­able school effectiveness […]

To help mit­i­gate struc­tur­al dis­ad­van­tage, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) frame­work for equi­tably allo­cat­ing COVID-19 vac­cines pro­posed increas­ing allo­ca­tions to worse-off minori­ties through the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). However, the extent of ben­e­fit is unknown. Moreover, since SVI includes a race vari­able and could face legal chal­lenges, it is desir­able to […]