Journal of Policy Analysis and Management最新文献

Many schools are experiencing troubling numbers of vacant teaching positions, with student achievement substantially below pre-pandemic levels. At the same time many states and districts are discussing substantial across-the-board increases in teacher salaries, often aspiring to some arbitrary benchmark. General increases in teacher salaries may well be warranted in some, or even many, districts. However, existing research suggests that by themselves, across-the-board increases are not the most effective policy.

This policy brief examines these issues in Virginia. It shows that schools with concentrations of poor students have substantially more teaching vacancies and much lower student achievement. It also shows that starting teacher salaries in Virginia have declined over the last 16 years and that lower salaries are associated with teacher vacancies. It is likely that the patterns documented in Virginia are found in many, perhaps most, other states. Policies to address these issues would increase teacher salaries generally with much larger increases for effective teachers who teach in high poverty schools and subjects with greater shortages, such as special education, math, and science.

I estimate whether the ability to anonymously surrender an infant to a safe haven site such as a hospital, police station, or fire station in the United States affects child well-being. By analyzing variation in state safe haven policies, I find safe haven laws significantly increase infant foster care entrance. I further find suggestive evidence of safe havens reducing infant deaths. The mortality effects are immediate but subside over time, implying infants have been relinquished when their alternative was not death from abuse or abandonment. Robustness checks and falsification tests support these findings.

We study the returns to experience in teaching, estimated using supervisor ratings from classroom observations. We describe the assumptions required to interpret changes in observation ratings over time as the causal effect of experience on performance. We compare two difference-in-differences strategies: the two-way fixed effects estimator common in the literature, and an alternative which avoids potential bias arising from effect heterogeneity. Using data from Tennessee and Washington, DC, we show empirical tests relevant to assessing the identifying assumptions and substantive threats—e.g., leniency bias, manipulation, changes in incentives or job assignments—and find our estimates are robust to several threats.

Recently, U.S. advocates and funders have supported direct cash transfers for individuals and families as an efficient, immediate, and non-paternalistic path to poverty alleviation. Open questions remain, however, about their implementation. We address these using data from debit card transactions, customer service call-line logs, and in-depth interviews from a randomized control study of a monthly unconditional cash gift delivered via debit card to mothers of young children living near the federal poverty line. Because much of the impact of the intervention occurs through mothers’ decisions about how to allocate the Baby's First Years (BFY) money, we argue that implementation science must recognize the role of policy targets in implementing policy, not just in terms of policy outcomes but also policy implementation processes. Further, our analysis shows that mothers experience key aspects of the cash intervention's design as intended: they viewed the cash gift as unconditional and knew the money was reliable and would continue monthly, receiving the correct amount with few incidents. Delivering funds via debit card worked well, offering mothers flexibility in purchasing. We also illuminate how design features shaped mothers’ experiences. First, although they knew it was unconditional, the social meaning of the BFY money to mothers—seen as “the baby's money”—shaped their engagement with and allocation of it. Second, low public visibility of mothers’ receipt of this money limited the financial demands or requests from others, potentially facilitating more agency over and a greater ability to use the money as they chose, without claims from kin.

We provide novel evidence on how firms and patients respond to vaccine recommendations. In 2014, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that elderly adults receive the pneumococcal vaccine Prevnar 13. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we first show that, following the recommendation, the manufacturer (Pfizer) increased direct-to-consumer advertising. We then document increased Prevnar 13–related information-seeking behavior, and we show that targeted adults were more likely to have received a pneumococcal vaccine and were more connected to the health care system. Overall, the recommendation increased both Medicare Part B drug expenditures and Pfizer sales by approximately $1 billion annually, with little to no observable health benefits.

This paper examines the impact of high-fatality school shootings on the subsequent outcomes of the survivors of those events. We focus specifically on the shootings at Columbine High School (Littleton, CO), Sandy Hook Elementary (Newtown, CT), and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School (Parkland, FL). We assess the subsequent educational record, including attendance and test scores, and the long-term health consequences of surviving students. In all analyses, we treat the timing and location of these events as random, enabling us to identify causal effects. Our results indicate that these high-fatality school shootings led to substantial reductions in attendance and test scores. These educational effects appear to be larger than the effects of shootings with fewer fatalities estimated by others. Children who survived the Columbine shooting were more likely to die by age 30, particularly among boys. They experienced higher levels of suicide and accidental poisonings (overdoses).

Over the past 25 years, the Government of Quebec (Canada) has introduced a number of relatively novel policies aimed at fighting poverty such as the Universal Child Care Program (UCCP) in 1997 and the Quebec Parental Insurance Program (QPIP) in 2006. Since its inception, the QPIP has provided a means-tested supplementary benefits scheme for disadvantaged households. The scheme yields a well-defined kink in the benefits schedule with respect to two entirely exogenous criteria. Using the QPIP administrative data files from 2006 to 2017, we estimate the causal impact of the supplemental benefits on leave duration and participation of poor households within a sharp Regression Kink Design (RKD) approach. Our results indicate that single mothers are relatively responsive to additional benefits. Conversely, partnered mothers are not found to respond to the supplemental benefits, irrespective of fathers’ own participation in the parental leave. The Canadian government is currently considering introducing a similar parental leave program. Our results may prove useful for the design of the program.