Charles T. Clotfelter

Teacher-Student Matching and the Assessment of Teacher Effectiveness

Administrative data on fifth grade students in North Carolina shows that more highly qualified teachers tend to be matched with more advantaged students, both across schools and in many cases within them. This matching biases estimates of the relationship between teacher characteristics and achievement; we isolate this bias in part by focusing on schools where students are distributed relatively evenly across classrooms. Teacher experience is consistently associated with achievement; teacher licensure test scores associate with math achievement. These returns display a form of heterogeneity across students that may help explain why the observed form of teacher-student matching persists in equilibrium.

Charitable Giving, Income, and Taxes: An Analysis of Panel Data

This study implies that taxes affect the level of contributions by way of a price effect and an income effect, each of which has two components, a transitory one and a persistent one. The findings suggest that persistent shocks in incomes have a larger impact on charitable donations than do their transitory counterparts. The most important behavioral aspect for considerations of tax policy is the persistent price effect, since transitory effects are passing. Through this effect tax reforms can have a long-lasting influence on charitable giving.

Tax incentives and charitable contributions in the United States: A microeconometric analysis

The American public sector relies substantially more on private nonprofit institutions than is common in most other countries. Higher education, health care, the visual and performing arts, and general community services are produced by voluntary institutions. Even when these institutions receive most of their income from user charges and public funds, they depend on private contributions to provide the basic ‘equity capital’ and to support new ventures.’ The federal income tax law allows the value of contributions to be deducted in calculating taxable income. The ‘price’ of one dollar’s contribution to a philanthropic organization, measured in terms of foregone income after tax, therefore varies inversely with the individual’s marginal tax rate. There are today a number of widely discussed proposals for changing the tax treatment of charitable contributions. These include the complete abolition of the deduction, the substitution of a system of tax credits, the,introduction of a ‘floor’ with a deduction or credit only for contributions above that level, and various modifi-

Alumni giving to elite private colleges and universities

Abstract This paper examines patterns of alumni giving, using data on two cohorts of former students from a sample of private colleges and universities. Higher levels of contributions are associated with higher income, whether or not the person graduated from the institution where he or she first attended college, and the degree of satisfaction with his or her undergraduate experience. Their satisfaction in turn was a function of particular aspects of that experience, including whether there was someone who took a special interest when he or she was enrolled there. Among the more recent cohort of graduates, those who had received need-based aid tended to give less and those who were related to former alumni tended to give more.

Tax incentives and charitable giving: evidence from a panel of taxpayers

There has been a great deal of interest among students of tax policy in the effect of individual income tax on the level and distribution of charitable giving in the United States. The empirical work on this question has focused on the elasticity of charitable contributions with respect to the tax-defined ‘price’ of giving, where the price is the net cost to the taxpayer per dollar of giving. Beginning in 1975, Martin Feldstein and his associates published a number of studies suggesting that this elasticity is generally greater than one in absolute value.’ These findings imply that the level of charitable giving is quite sensitive to tax policy. As an illustration, Feldstein and Taylor (1976, p. 1218) calculated that charitable giving in 1970 would have been 26 percent less had contributions not been deductible in that year. In addition, these elasticity estimates imply that charities will gain more in contributions from tax incentives than the Treasury will lose in revenues. Subsequently, other econometric studies have produced estimates that are of the same order of magnitude.2 To date, all of the econometric studies on this question using samples of individuals3 have had to rely on cross-section data. The purpose of the current paper is to present estimates of the price and income elasticities of

The Academic Achievement Gap in Grades 3 to 8

Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on cohorts of students who stay in the states public schools for all six years. While the black-white gaps are sizable and robust, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress in school. Beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while those for high-performing students have generally widened.

Who benefits from the nonprofit sector

This accessible study examines all the major elements of the nonprofit sector of the economy of the United States —health services, educational and research institutions, religious organizations, social services, arts and cultural organizations, and foundations—describing the institutions and their functions, and then exploring how their benefits are distributed across various economic classes. The books findings indicate that while few institutions serve primarily the poor, there is no evidence of a gross distribution of benefits upward toward the more affluent. The analysis of this data makes for a book with profound implications for future social and tax policy.

Private security and the public safety

Abstract The demand for private protection and the effect of such protective measures on the level of crime are examined. Private protection may reduce a households expected victimization rate either by deterring some crime or by diverting crime to other households. The greater the relative importance of the latter effect, the more likely a community is to “tip” in the direction of deserting the streets at night and taking other precautions. Data on crime and protection are analyzed, but they are inadequate for a full estimation of the model. The paper concludes with a normative analysis of protection and implications for social policy.

Teacher Mobility, School Segregation, and Pay-Based Policies to Level the Playing Field

Research has consistently shown that teacher quality is distributed very unevenly among schools, to the clear disadvantage of minority students and those from low-income families. Using North Carolina data on the length of time individual teachers remain in their schools, we examine the potential for using salary differentials to overcome this pattern. We conclude that salary differentials are a far less effective tool for retaining teachers with strong preservice qualifications than for retaining other teachers in schools with high proportions of minority students. Consequently large salary differences would be needed to level the playing field when schools are segregated. This conclusion reflects our finding that teachers with stronger qualifications are both more responsive to the racial and socioeconomic mix of a schools students and less responsive to salary than are their less-qualified counterparts when making decisions about remaining in their current school, moving to another school or district, or leaving the teaching profession.

Retaking the SAT

Using data on applicants to three selective universities, we analyze a college applicant’s decision to retake the SAT. We model this decision as an optimal search problem, and use the model to assess the impact of college admissions policies on retaking behavior. The most common test score ranking policy, which utilizes only the highest of all submitted scores, provides large incentives to retake the test. This places certain applicants at a disadvantage: those with high test-taking costs, those attaching low values to college admission, and those with “pessimistic” prior beliefs regarding their own ability.