Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Economics

Center for Policy Research

Series

Education

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Towering Intellects? Sizing Up The Relationship Between Height And Academic Success, Stephanie Coffey, Amy Ellen Schwartz Dec 2021

Towering Intellects? Sizing Up The Relationship Between Height And Academic Success, Stephanie Coffey, Amy Ellen Schwartz

Center for Policy Research

Do tall students do better in school? While a robust literature documents higher earnings among taller people, we know little about the potential academic origins of the height earnings gradient. In this paper, we use unique student-level longitudinal data from New York City (NYC) to examine the link between height and academic outcomes, shedding light on underlying mechanisms. The centerpiece of our empirical work is a regression linking academic outcomes to height, measured as a z-score normalized to same grade/sex peers within schools. We estimate a meaningful height gradient for both boys and girls in ELA and math achievement in …


Using Pupil Transportation Data To Explore Educational Inequities And Outcomes: A Case Study From New York City, Sarah Cordes, Samantha Trajkovski, Christopher Rick, Meryle Weinstein, Amy Ellen Schwartz Dec 2021

Using Pupil Transportation Data To Explore Educational Inequities And Outcomes: A Case Study From New York City, Sarah Cordes, Samantha Trajkovski, Christopher Rick, Meryle Weinstein, Amy Ellen Schwartz

Center for Policy Research

This article explores how researchers can use pupil transportation data to explore key questions about the role of transportation in educational access and equity, such as how students get to school and the effect of transportation on student outcomes. We first describe different sources of transportation data that are available to researchers, provide a brief review of relevant literature, and discuss potential sources of measurement error in pupil transportation data. Next, we use administrative data from New York City to illustrate how pupil transportation data can be used to understand transportation eligibility and assignment as well as to describe the …


What Makes A Classmate A Peer? Examining Which Peers Matter In Nyc Elementary Schools, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Jonathan L. Pressler, Amy Ellen Schwartz Nov 2021

What Makes A Classmate A Peer? Examining Which Peers Matter In Nyc Elementary Schools, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Jonathan L. Pressler, Amy Ellen Schwartz

Center for Policy Research

Generalizing the group interaction model of Lee (2007), we identify and estimate the effects of student level social spillovers on standardized test performance in New York City (NYC) elementary schools. We leverage student demographic data to construct within-classroom social networks based on shared student characteristics, such as a gender or ethnicity. Rather than aggregate shared characteristics into a single network matrix, we specify additively separate network matrices for each shared characteristic and estimate city-wide peer effects for each one. Conditional on being in the same classroom, we find that the most important student peer effects are shared ethnicity, gender, and …


Technical Efficiency Of Public Middle Schools In New York City, William C. Horrace, Michah W. Rothbart, Yi Yang Dec 2020

Technical Efficiency Of Public Middle Schools In New York City, William C. Horrace, Michah W. Rothbart, Yi Yang

Center for Policy Research

Using panel data and a “true” fixed effect stochastic frontier model, we estimate persistent and transient technical inefficiency in mathematics (Math) and English Language Arts (ELA) test score gains in NYC public middle schools from 2014 to 2016. We compare several measures of transient technical inefficiency and show that around 58% of NYC middle schools are efficient in Math gains, while 16% are efficient in ELA gains. Multivariate inference techniques are used to determine subsets of efficient schools, providing actionable decision rules to help policymakers target resources and incentives.


Genetic Risks, Adolescent Health And Schooling Attainment, Vikesh Amin, Jere R. Behrman, Jason M. Fletcher, Carlos A. Flores, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hans-Peter Kohler Jul 2020

Genetic Risks, Adolescent Health And Schooling Attainment, Vikesh Amin, Jere R. Behrman, Jason M. Fletcher, Carlos A. Flores, Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, Hans-Peter Kohler

Center for Policy Research

We provide new evidence on the effect of adolescent health behaviors/outcomes (obesity, depression, smoking, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)) on schooling attainment using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. We take two different approaches to deal with omitted variable bias and reverse causality. Our first approach attends to the issue of reverse causality by using health polygenic scores (PGSs) as proxies for actual adolescent health. Second, we estimate the effect of adolescent health using sibling fixed-effects models that control for unmeasured genetic and family factors shared by siblings. We use the PGSs as additional controls in …