| JPAM Preview ▪ August 2013 |
| JPAM Preview is a newsletter that calls attention to forthcoming articles in JPAM. JPAM Preview provides brief summaries of content now available digitally in Early View, Wiley's online publication system. |
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| Feature Article The Use and Efficacy of Capacity-Building Assistance for Low-Performing Districts: The Case of California's District Assistance and Intervention Teams Katharine O. Strunk, Andrew McEachin, and Theresa N. Westover The theory of action upon which high-stakes accountability policies are based calls for systemic reforms in educational systems that will emerge by pairing incentives for improvement with extensive and targeted technical assistance (TA) to build the capacity of low-performing schools and districts. To this end, a little discussed and often overlooked aspect of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandated that, in addition to sanctions, states were required to provide TA to build the capacity of struggling schools and Local Education Agencies (LEAs, or districts) to help them improve student achievement. Although every state in the country provides some form of TA to its lowest performing districts, we know little about the content of these programs or about their efficacy in improving student performance. In this paper, we use both quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the actions taken by TA providers in one state-California-and examine whether the TA and support tied to California's NCLB sanctions succeeds in improving student achievement. Like many other states, California requires that districts labeled as persistently failing under NCLB (in Program Improvement year 3, PI3) work with external experts to help them build the capacity to make reforms that will improve student achievement. California's lowest performing PI3 districts are given substantial amounts of funding and are required to contract with state-approved District Assistance and Intervention Teams (DAITs), whereas the remaining PI3 districts receive less funding and are asked to access less intensive TA from non-DAIT providers. We use a five-year panel difference-in-difference design to estimate the impacts of DAITs on student performance on the math and English language arts (ELA) standardized tests relative to non-DAIT TA during the two years of the program intervention. We find that students in districts with DAITs perform significantly better on math California Standards Tests (CSTs) averaged over both treatment years and in each of the first and second years. We do not find evidence that students in districts with DAITs perform higher on ELA CSTs over the combined two years of treatment, although we find suggestive evidence that ELA performance increases in the second year of treatment relative to students in districts with non-DAIT TA. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions that explore the association between specific activities fostered by DAITs and changes in districts' gains in achievement over the two years of treatment show that DAIT districts that report increasing their focus on using data to guide instruction, shifting district culture to generate and maintain high expectations of students and staff, and increasing within-district accountability for student performance, have higher math achievement gains over the course of the DAIT treatment. In addition, DAIT districts that increase their focus on ELA instruction and shift district culture to one of high expectations have higher ELA achievement gains than do DAIT districts that do not have a similar focus. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We used the random assignment in Project STAR (the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment) to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We found that assignment to a small class increases students' probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among black students. Among students enrolled in the poorest third of schools, the effect is 7.3 percentage points. Smaller classes increased the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shifted students toward high-earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), business, and economics. We found that test-score effects at the time of the experiment were an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article Collection of Delinquent Fines: An Adaptive Randomized Trial to Assess the Effectiveness of Alternative Text Messages Laura C. Hayes, Donald P. Green, Rory Gallagher, Peter John, and David J. Torgerson The collection of delinquent fines is a vast and ongoing public administration challenge. In the United Kingdom, unpaid fines amount to more than 500 million pounds. Managing noncompliant accounts and dispatching bailiffs to collect fines in person is costly. This paper reports the results of a large randomized controlled trial, led by the UK Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights Team, which was designed to test the effectiveness of mobile phone text messaging as an alternative method of inducing people to pay their outstanding fines. An adaptive trial design was used, first to test the effectiveness of text messaging against no treatment and then to test the relative effectiveness of alternative messages. Text messages, which are relatively inexpensive, are found to significantly increase average payment of delinquent fines. We found text messages to be especially effective when they address the recipient by name. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article The Effect of the Kyoto Protocol on Carbon Emissions Rachel Aichele and Gabriel Felbermayr Since 1997, CO2 emissions have continued to rise in many countries despite their emission caps under the Kyoto Protocol (Kyoto). Failure to meet promised targets, however, does not imply that Kyoto has been pointless. Whether Kyoto has made a difference relative to the counterfactual of "No Kyoto" is an empirical question that requires an instrumental variables strategy. We argue that countries' ratification of the statutes governing the International Criminal Court is a valid instrument for ratification of Kyoto commitments. In our panel fixed effects estimations, the instrument easily passes weak identification and overidentification tests. It can be plausibly excluded from our second-stage equations and does not cause CO2 emissions. Our estimates suggest that Kyoto ratification has a quantitatively large (about 10 percent) and robust, though only moderately statistically significant, negative effect on CO2 emissions. We also show that higher fuel prices and a different energy mix in Kyoto countries support this result. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article Discouraging Disadvantaged Fathers' Employment: An Unintended Consequence of Policies Designed to Support Families Maria Cancian, Carolyn J. Heinrich, and Yiyoon Chung Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers' employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a consequence of unemployment and low child support order compliance. We used childbirth costs charged in unmarried mothers' Medicaid-covered childbirths, from Wisconsin administrative records, as an exogenous source of variation to identify the impact of debt. We found that greater debt has a substantial negative effect on fathers' formal employment and child support payments, and that this effect is mediated by fathers' prebirth earnings histories. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article Choice in a World of New School Types J.S. Butler, Douglas A. Carr, Eugenia F. Toma, and Ron Zimmer As school choice options have evolved over recent years, it is important to understand what family and school factors are associated with the enrollment decisions families make. Use of restricted-access data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study allowed us to identify household location from a nationally representative sample of students and to match households to the actual schools attended and other nearby schools. This matching is significant as previous research generally has not been able to link individual households to school enrollment decisions. Using these data, we examined the role that socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity play in school enrollment decisions. One of our more interesting results suggests that the newest public alternative, charter schools, attracts families with higher socioeconomic status than those that traditional public schools attract. The attraction of charter schools, however, unlike traditional public schools, appears to be racially and ethnically neutral. Families do not choose a charter school because of its racial or ethnic composition, nor do race and ethnicity within a household influence its choice of charter schools. Other socioeconomic factors influencing charter school choice are more similar to factors explaining private school choice than to those factors explaining the choice of traditional public schools. The findings suggest that policies governing the design of charter schools should focus on broader socioeconomic diversity rather than race only. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article The Effects of Green Cards on the Wages and Innovations of PhDs Xiaohuan Lan Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United States. Many CSPA beneficiaries, Chinese students who became permanent residents, did not pursue postdoctoral training and instead entered the public or private sector directly. This supply shift increased the relative wage of native postdocs to non-postdocs. Four to eight years after graduation, CSPA beneficiaries earned 9 percent more than the comparison group, were less likely to work in academia, published fewer research articles, and produced more patents. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Feature Article Do Alternative Base Periods Increase Unemployment Insurance Receipt Among Low-Educated Unemployed Workers? Alix Gould-Werth and H. Luke Shaefer Unemployment Insurance (UI) is the major social insurance program that protects against lost earnings resulting from involuntary unemployment. Existing literature finds that low-earning unemployed workers experience difficulty accessing UI benefits. The most prominent policy reform designed to increase rates of monetary eligibility, and thus UI receipt, among these unemployed workers is the Alternative Base Period (ABP). In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sought to increase use of the ABP, making ABP adoption a necessary precondition for states to receive their share of the $7 billion targeted at UI programs. By January 2013, 40 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the ABP despite the absence of an evaluation of ABP efficacy using nationally representative data. This study analyzes Current Population Survey data from 1987 to 2011 to assess the efficacy of the ABP in increasing UI receipt among low-educated unemployed workers. We used a natural-experiment design to capture the combined behavioral and mechanical effects of the policy change. We found no association between state-level ABP adoption and individual UI receipt for all unemployed workers. However, among part-time unemployed workers with less than a high school degree, adoption of the ABP was associated with a 2.8 percentage point increase in the probability of UI receipt. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Point/Counterpoint Fertility Policy Kenneth A. Couch, Editor Few policy changes have prompted wider discussion and debate than the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 that ensured women's legal access to abortion in the United States. Preceded by the Griswold v. Connecticut decision in 1965 that similarly ensured access to the Pill and prior FDA approval of it as an oral contraceptive, these changes in policy related to fertility have been credited with wide-ranging consequences both in women's lives and in the structure of society. Scholars and other observers have argued that these changes in women's control of fertility decisions resulted in greater educational attainment, later marriages, fewer children, increases in divorce, reduced crime, and more occupational choices: There are few corners of society that have not been impacted by these policies. Forty years beyond Roe v. Wade, the decision remains controversial and legislative proposals aimed at eliminating access to abortion are common at the state and federal levels of government. Assessing the potential impact of these proposals can be inferred to some extent through the lens of what happened when the Roe decision occurred in the context of access to the Pill, although that task is further complicated by the emergence since then of additional methods of contraception. Here I ask participants in this Point/Counterpoint to address the following framing questions: 1. How important was the Pill to women's economic well-being? 2. If Roe v. Wade were overturned, how might society change? One group of authors participating in this Point/Counterpoint includes Martha J. Bailey (Associate Professor, University of Michigan and NBER), Melanie Guldi (Assistant Professor, Central Florida University), and Brad J. Hershbein (Economist, W.E. Upjohn Institute). Theodore Joyce (Professor, City University of New York, Baruch College, and NBER) provides an alternative viewpoint. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Point/Counterpoint How Important was the Pill to Women's Economic Well-Being? If Roe v. Wade Were Overturned, How Might Society Change? Ted Joyce The introduction of the contraceptive pill (the Pill) in 1960 and legalized abortion in the 1970s expanded women's control over whether, when, and with whom to have children. There is widespread belief, recently bolstered by a series of academic papers, that these changes resulted in women having fewer children and making greater human capital investments in education and employment (Ananat & Hungerman, 2012; Bailey, 2006, 2009; Goldin & Katz, 2002; Guldi, 2008). However, the 1960s and 1970s were decades of sweeping social change. The women's movement, civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and changing sexual mores interacted in complicated ways with these new methods of fertility control. Sorting out the causal impact of the Pill or abortion on women's economic well-being amid these evolving social forces is a challenge for any observational study. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Point/Counterpoint Recent Evidence on the Broad Benefits of Reproductive Health Policy Martha J. Bailey, Melanie Guldi, and Brad J. Hershbein Randomized controlled experiments are the gold standard of causal analysis, but they are unavailable to answer many questions of policy interest. Access to the Pill or abortion, for instance, was never explicitly randomly assigned, so quasi-experiments provide an important path for understanding their effects. We agree with some of Joyce's arguments regarding abortion. But his arguments regarding the Pill lose site of the forest for the trees and distract from the major policy questions at stake. His comments on the Pill focus narrowly on one genre of studies-those using as a research design changes in the age of consent for contraception ("early legal access to the Pill," ELA)-and ignore the larger body of quasi-experimental evidence on the broad benefits of reproductive health policy. In this response, we address his four critiques of the ELA literature, describe the assumptions necessary for them to matter in practice, and present historical and empirical evidence on their relevance. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Point/Counterpoint If Only Policy Analysis Were So Easy Ted Joyce I thank Martha Bailey, Melanie Guldi, and Brad Hershbein (BGH) for participating in this exchange. Let me begin with our points of agreement. We agree that we can use changes in reproductive policies to evaluate the impact of the Pill or abortion on a range of reproductive and economic outcomes if the following hold: (1) Policies have meaningful effects on contraceptive use or abortion-a robust first stage; (2) policies operate on outcomes only through increased contraception or abortion-the exclusion restriction; and (3) the states and years in which policies are enacted represent a random draw across time and jurisdictions-random assignment. I would add a fourth: That researchers trace out a plausible causal chain. Policies should not just affect Pill use or abortion, but policies need to substantially impact first-order outcomes such as fertility if more downstream effects are to be analyzed. These are demanding criteria. I suspect that BGH would agree with me that in the case of abortion legalization the first and fourth criterion are largely satisfied. For example, the early legalization of abortion in selected states prior to Roe had a significant effect on abortion and birth rates (Joyce, Tan, & Zhang, 2012; Levine et al., 1999). Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Point/Counterpoint Further Evidence on the Internal Validity of the Early Legal Access Research Design Martha J. Bailey, Melanie Guldi, and Brad J. Hershbein Randomized controlled experiments are the gold standard of causal analysis, but they are unavailable to answer many questions of policy interest. Access to the Pill or abortion, for instance, was never explicitly randomly assigned, so quasi-experiments provide an important path for understanding their effects. We agree with some of Joyce's arguments regarding abortion. But his arguments regarding the Pill lose site of the forest for the trees and distract from the major policy questions at stake. His comments on the Pill focus narrowly on one genre of studies-those using as a research design changes in the age of consent for contraception ("early legal access to the Pill," ELA)-and ignore the larger body of quasi-experimental evidence on the broad benefits of reproductive health policy. In this response, we address his four critiques of the ELA literature, describe the assumptions necessary for them to matter in practice, and present historical and empirical evidence on their relevance. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| International Conference News Asian Social Protection in Comparative Perspective Karen J. Baehler and Douglas J. Besharov Asia's expanding economic and geopolitical importance has generated worldwide interest in its social protection and social welfare programs. How are the diverse countries that comprise Asia addressing the persistent 21st century challenges of aging, disability, changing family structures, rising health care costs, education for emerging industries, and poverty among both working people and those without jobs? What lessons can be learned from recent policy developments, and how can they be applied to improve social outcomes in the future? More than 100 scholars and practitioners from 18 countries met in Singapore in 2009 to explore these questions under the auspices of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy. The conference, titled "Asian Social Protection in Comparative Perspective," featured both single-country and multicountry comparison studies addressing issues of aging and pensions, disability, long-term care, assets and entrepreneurship, health care, poverty, family formation, labor markets, outsourcing of services, education, public assistance, social insurance, and the political economy of welfare regimes. All of the conference papers can be found at ">http://umdcipe.org/conferences/policy_exchanges/conf_papers/index.shtml">http://umdcipe.org/conferences/policy_exchanges/conf_papers/index.shtml. Forthcoming in JPAM 32(4). Link to JPAM Early View. If you want to cite this article before it is in print, please use the DOI number listed with each article. |
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| Journal of Policy Analysis and Management is published by Wiley Periodicals on behalf of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Editor-in-Chief: Maureen Pirog ▪ Indiana University, School of Public and Environmental Affairs (and) University of Washington, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs Managing Editors: Robert Kaestner ▪ University of Illinois at Chicago Christopher (Kitt) Carpenter ▪ University of California, Irvine | |
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