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Group-Average Observables As Controls For Sorting On Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects: The Case Of School And Neighborhood Effects, Joseph G. Altonji, Richard K. Mansfield
Group-Average Observables As Controls For Sorting On Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects: The Case Of School And Neighborhood Effects, Joseph G. Altonji, Richard K. Mansfield
Rick Mansfield
We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially absorbs all the across-group variation in unobservable individual characteristics. We use this insight to bound the treatment effect variance of school systems and associated neighborhoods for various outcomes. Across four datasets, our conservative estimates indicate that a 90th versus 10th percentile school system increases high school graduation and college enrollment probabilities by at least 0.047 and 0.11. Other applications include measurement of teacher value-added.
Teacher Quality And Student Inequality - Web Appendix (Revised 2014), Richard K. Mansfield
Teacher Quality And Student Inequality - Web Appendix (Revised 2014), Richard K. Mansfield
Rick Mansfield
This appendix is a supplement to the author's paper, Teacher Quality and Student Inequality, which can be found here: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/workingpapers/162/
Task-Specific Experience And Task-Specific Talent: Decomposing The Productivity Of High School Teachers, Jason B. Cook, Richard K. Mansfield
Task-Specific Experience And Task-Specific Talent: Decomposing The Productivity Of High School Teachers, Jason B. Cook, Richard K. Mansfield
Rick Mansfield
We use administrative panel data to decompose worker performance into components relating to general talent, task-specific talent, general experience, and task-specific experience. We consider the context of high school teachers, in which tasks consist of teaching particular subjects in particular tracks. Using the timing of changes in the subjects and levels to which teachers are assigned to provide identifying variation, we show that much of the productivity gains to teacher experience estimated in the literature are actually subject-specific. By contrast, very little of the variation in the permanent component of productivity among teachers is subject-specific or level-specific. Counterfactual simulations suggest …
Teacher Quality And Student Inequality (Revised 2014), Richard K. Mansfield
Teacher Quality And Student Inequality (Revised 2014), Richard K. Mansfield
Rick Mansfield
This paper examines the extent to which the allocation of teachers within and across public high schools is contributing to inequality in student test score performance. Using ten years of administrative data from North Carolina public high schools, I estimate a flexible education production function in which student achievement reflects student inputs, teacher quality, school quality, and a school-specific scaling factor that allows the impact of teaching quality to vary across schools. The existence of nearly 3,000 teacher transfers, combined with a testable exogenous mobility assumption, allows separate identification of each teacher’s quality from both school quality and school sensitivity …