Research

Working Papers

• [School Competition, Resource Allocation, and Inequality in Student Outcomes] [Job Market Paper]

  This paper studies schools’ resource allocation decisions in response to increased competition induced by school choice programs and considers the equity and efficiency implications of alternative school choice designs. Using administrative data in North Carolina, I examine the impact of nearby charter openings on the class structure and the allocation of teachers to students within traditional public schools (TPSs). I find that TPSs experience a significant attrition of teachers and a disproportionate exodus of economically advantaged and high-achieving students to charter schools. Subsequently, TPSs reduce class offerings, resulting in a significant increase in both class size and the student-teacher ratio. Faced with the dual pressures of enlarged class sizes and the necessity of maintaining school proficiency rates dictated by accountability systems, TPSs undertake measures to enhance the allocation equity and efficiency of teaching resources. This involves a strategic reassignment of more high-quality teachers to disadvantaged students, and the enhancement in teacher-student racial matching. Furthermore, I develop and estimate a structural model of school competition, taking account of TPSs’ teacher assignment policy under competition. This model is utilized to explore the implications of the policy of scaling up the charter sector. Results show that expanding the charter sector is effective in improving the equity in the distribution of high-quality teachers and in mitigating the achievement gaps. Enhancing teacher-student matching is also an effective strategy to achieve allocative efficiency.

• Climate Change and Learning Loss: Evidence from Wildfire School Closures in California with Yifeng Luo

  This paper examines the causal effect of unexpected school closures due to wildfires on student academic achievement. We exploit exogenous variation in the intensity of wildfire school closures in California between 2009 and 2017 as a natural experiment. We find that wildfire school closures have negative effects on both ELA and math test scores. On average, one wildfire school closure day decreases both math and ELA scores by 0.02 standard deviations relative to the scores of the national reference cohort in the same grade. We also find that closures lasting 2-5 school days have more severe impacts on test scores, compared to closures that last for only one day or more than 5 days. Students with lower socioeconomic status experience larger negative effects from such unexpected closures. Furthermore, we show that school time loss and air pollution are two important mechanisms contributing to the decline we measure in student achievement.

Work in Progress

• Incentives to Finance: How Governments Affect the Tuition-Free Policy in Vocational Schools in China with Zhilei Tian

  This paper assesses how government subsidies, aimed at reducing schooling costs to increase enrollment, interact with the supply-side fiscal burden. Policies like school fee waivers may heighten fiscal pressure on governments and potentially dampen their motivation to fund education, especially if such policies are imposed by higher-level authorities rather than being self-initiated. We analyze the impact of fiscal burdens from tuition-free policies on enrollment in China’s secondary vocational schools. Through a geographic regression discontinuity design exploiting variation in fiscal responsibilities across county borders, we find a 21% enrollment decrease in these schools, with variations ranging from 14% to 40%. We also find that larger fiscal responsibilities borne by local governments lead to greater enrollment reductions.