Scott A. Imberman

Achievement and Behavior in Charter Schools: Drawing a More Complete Picture

Using a long panel with broad grade coverage, I assess how charter schools af fect test scores, attendance, and discipline in order to establish whether these schools affect cognitive and non-cognitive skill formation. Schools that begin as charters generate large improvements in discipline and attendance but not test scores, with the exception of math scores in middle schools. I interpret this as re ecting improvements in non-cognitive skills but not cognitive skills. These improvements do not persist if students return to regular pub- lic schools. Charters that convert from regular public schools have little impact on cognitive or non-cognitive skill formation. These results are robust to potential bias from selection off of pre-charter trends, attrition and persistence.

Incentive Strength and Teacher Productivity: Evidence from a Group-Based Teacher Incentive Pay System

We estimate the impact of incentive strength on achievement under a group-based teacher incentive pay program. The system provides variation in the share of students in a subject-grade that a teacher instructs, which proxies for incentive strength. We find that achievement on incentivized exams, but not nonincentivized exams, improves when incentives strengthen. For the incentivized exams, we find that effects fade out monotonically as a teachers portion of the group increases to between 20 and 30 percentage and are larger for teachers with low-achieving students. Calculations based off these estimates show modest positive effects of the program overall.

Capitalization of Charter Schools into Residential Property Values

Although prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census-block fixed effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of a charter school affects housing prices on average. We do find, however, that when restricting to districts other than Los Angeles Unified and counting only charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration.

Are There Returns to Attending a Private College or University

Strains on the Federal budget have created worries that Federal funding of aid for higher education will fall in the future. If this happens, state governments will need to try to re-allocate their higher education spending more efficiently. One possible way to do this would be to shift funding away from public provision towards demand-side subsidies so that more students could attend private colleges. However, this will only work if private colleges provide benefits to students over public. Whether this is true is theoretically and empirically unclear. In order to answer this question, I use highly detailed and rich data sets to assess whether there are benefits to attending private colleges over public ones. For males the wage return is small and insignificant during their twenties but both statistically and economically significant at around 11% by the time the students reach their mid-thirties. For females I do not find any statistically significant wage returns. Attending a private school does appear to enhance future educational outcomes for both genders. In particular, the increase in likelihood of obtaining a bachelor degree is 13.5 percentage points for men and 8.9 percentage points for women.