Person: Cohodes, Sarah
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Cohodes
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Cohodes, Sarah
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Publication School Accountability, Postsecondary Attainment and Earnings(National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013) Deming, David; Cohodes, Sarah; Jennings, Jennifer; Jencks, ChristopherWe study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project (TSP). We find that high schools respond to the risk of being rated Low-Performing by increasing student achievement on high-stakes exams. Years later, these students are more likely to have attended college and completed a four-year degree, and they have higher earnings at age 25. However, we find no overall impact - and large declines in attainment and earnings for low-scoring students - of pressure to achieve a higher accountability rating.Publication Essays on the Economics of Education(2015-05-12) Cohodes, Sarah; Avery, Christopher; Angrist, Joshua; Katz, LawrenceThis dissertation includes three essays in the field of economics of education. The first essay provides estimates of the long-run impacts of tracking high-achieving students using data from a Boston Public Schools (BPS) program, Advanced Work Class (AWC). AWC is an accelerated curriculum in 4th through 6th grades with dedicated classrooms. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach based on the AWC entrance exam, I find that AWC has little impact on test scores. However, it improves longer-term academic outcomes including Algebra 1 enrollment by 8th grade, AP exam taking, and college enrollment. The college enrollment effect is particularly large for elite institutions. Testing potential channels for program effects provides suggestive evidence that teacher effectiveness and math acceleration account for AWC effects, with little evidence that peer effects contribute to gains. The second essay uses item-level information from standardized tests to investigate whether large test score gains attributed to Boston charter schools can be explained by score inflation. To do so, I estimate the impact of charter school attendance on subscales of the test scores and examine them for evidence of score inflation. If charter schools are teaching to the test to a greater extent than their counterparts, one would expect to see higher scores on commonly tested standards, higher stakes subjects, and frequently tested topics. However, despite incentives to reallocate effort toward highly-tested content, and to coach to item type, I find no evidence of this type of test preparation. Boston charter middle schools perform consistently across all standardized test subscales. The third essay analyzes a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives high-scoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below the eligibility threshold finds that students are remarkably willing to forgo college quality and that scholarship use actually lowered college completion rates. These results suggest that college quality affects college completion rates. The theoretical prediction that in-kind subsidies of public institutions can reduce consumption of the subsidized good is shown to be empirically important.Publication Merit Aid, College Quality and College Completion: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship as an In-Kind Subsidy.(2017-07-11) Cohodes, Sarah; Goodman, JoshuaWe analyze a Massachusetts merit aid program that gives high-scoring students tuition waivers at in-state public colleges with lower graduation rates than available alternative colleges. A regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below the eligibility threshold finds that students are remarkably willing to forgo college quality and that scholarship use actually lowered college completion rates. These results suggest that college quality affects college completion rates. The theoretical prediction that in-kind subsidies of public institutions can reduce consumption of the subsidized good is shown to be empirically important.Publication First Degree Earns: The Impact of College Quality on College Completion Rates(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012) Cohodes, Sarah; Goodman, JoshuaWe use a Massachusetts merit aid program to provide the first clear causal evidence on the impact of college quality on students’ postsecondary enrollment decisions and rates of degree completion, where college quality is defined by a variety of measures including on-time graduation rates. High school students with test scores above multiple thresholds were granted tuition waivers at in-state public colleges of lower quality than the average alternative available to such students. A binding score regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below these thresholds yields two main findings. First, students are remarkably willing to forego college quality for relatively small amounts of money. Second, choosing a lower quality college significantly lowers on-time completion rates, a result driven by highskilled students who would otherwise have attended higher quality colleges. For the marginal student, enrolling at an in-state public college lowered the probability of graduating on time by more than 40%. The low completion rates of scholarship users imply the program had little impact on the in-state production of college degrees. More broadly, these results suggest that the critically important task of improving college quality requires steps beyond merely changing the composition of the student body.