Segregation and the Black-White Test Score Gap

The mid-1980s witnessed breaks in two important trends related to race and schooling. School segregation, which had been declining, began a period of relative stasis. Black-white test score gaps, which had also been declining, also stagnated. The notion that these two phenomena may be related is also supported by basic cross-sectional evidence. We review existing literature on the relationship between neighborhood- and school-level segregation and the test score gap. Several recent studies point to a statistically significant causal relationship between school segregation and the test score gap, though in many cases the magnitude of the relationship is small in economic terms. Experimental studies, as well as methodologically convincing non-experimental studies, suggest that there is little if any causal role for neighborhood segregation operating through a mechanism other than school segregation.

Sex, Drugs, and Catholic Schools: Private Schooling and Non-Market Adolescent Behaviors

This paper examines the effects of private schooling on adolescent non-market behaviors. We control for differences between private and public school students by making use of the rich set of covariates available with our NELS micro-dataset. We also employ an instrumental-variables strategy that exploits variation across metropolitan areas in the costs that parents face in transporting their children to private schools, which stem from differences in the quality of the local transportation infrastructure. We find evidence to suggest that religious private schooling reduces teen sexual activity, arrests, and use of hard drugs (cocaine), but not drinking, smoking, gang involvement, or marijuana use.

Does Head Start Improve Children’s Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the programs effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties in the U.S. to develop Head Start funding proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance, but no discontinuity in other forms of federal social spending. We find evidence of a large negative discontinuity at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children ages 5-9 from causes that could be affected by Head Start, but not for other mortality causes or birth cohorts that should not be affected by the program. We also find suggestive evidence for a positive effect of Head Start on educational attainment in both the 1990 Census, concentrated among those cohorts born late enough to have been exposed to the program, and among respondents in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988.heat start, reform, labor

Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program%u2019s effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties in the U.S. to develop Head Start funding proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance, but no discontinuity in other forms of federal social spending. We find evidence of a large negative discontinuity at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children ages 5-9 from causes that could be affected by Head Start, but not for other mortality causes or birth cohorts that should not be affected by the program. We also find suggestive evidence for a positive effect of Head Start on educational attainment in both the 1990 Census, concentrated among those cohorts born late enough to have been exposed to the program, and among respondents in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988.

Is Crime Contagious?

We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is “contagious” – or susceptible to what economists term “endogenous effects” – by examining the extent to which lower local-area crime rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment, in operation since 1994 in five U.S. cities, we exploit the fact that the effect of treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five demonstration sites and use treatment-site interactions to instrument for measures of post-randomization neighborhood crime rates as well as neighborhood poverty or racial segregation in analysis of individual arrest outcomes. We find no evidence that violence is contagious; neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for across-neighborhood variation in arrests for violent crimes. Our only evidence for contagion comes with less serious crimes. Some estimates suggest an effect for males, but these results are imprecise. We also find evidence that young males are more likely to engage in property crimes when violent crimes are relatively more prevalent within the community. These findings are consistent with a “resource swamping” model in which increases in the prevalence of more serious crimes dilutes the police resources available for deterring less serious crimes.endogenous effects, social multiplier, arrests, social experiment

The Benefits and Costs of Head Start

In this essay we review what is known about Head Start and argue that the program is likely to generate benefits to participants and society as a whole that are large enough to justify the program's costs. Our conclusions differ importantly from those offered in some previous reviews because we use a more appropriate standard to judge the success of Head Start (namely, benefit-cost analysis), draw on new accumulating evidence for Head Start's long-term effects on early cohorts of program participants, and discuss why common interpretations of a recent randomized experimental evaluation of Head Start's short-term impacts may be overly pessimistic. While in principle there could be more beneficial ways of deploying Head Start resources, the benefits of such changes remain uncertain and there is some downside risk.

The Effects of Gun Prevalence on Burglary: Deterrence vs Inducement

The proposition that widespread gun ownership serves as a deterrent to residential burglary is widely touted by advocates, but the evidence is weak, consisting of anecdotes, interviews with burglars, casual comparisons with other countries, and the like. A more systematic exploration requires data on local rates of gun ownership and of residential burglary, and such data have only recently become available. In this paper we exploit a new well-validated proxy for local gun-ownership prevalence -- the proportion of suicides that involve firearms -- together with newly available geo-coded data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, to produce the first systematic estimates of the net effects of gun prevalence on residential burglary patterns. The importance of such empirical work stems in part from the fact that theoretical considerations do not provide much guidance in predicting the net effects of widespread gun ownership. Guns in the home may pose a threat to burglars, but also serve as an inducement, since guns are particularly valuable loot. Other things equal, a gun-rich community provides more lucrative burglary opportunities than one where guns are more sparse. The new empirical results reported here provide no support for a net deterrent effect from widespread gun ownership. Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence.

Is Crime Contagious?

endogenous effects, social multiplier, arrests, social experiment