Person: Goodman, Joshua
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Goodman, Joshua
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Publication A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Co-Authors in Economics(Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) Goodman, Allen C.; Goodman, Joshua; Goodman, Lucas; Goodman, SarenaWe explore the phenomenon of co-authorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most two economist co-authors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have three economist co-authors who share a surname, as well as the first where such co-authors are unrelated by marriage or blood.Publication Low-Cost Interventions to Reduce Anonymity in Large Classes(2014) Goodman, JoshuaIn large classes, it is challenging for faculty to get to know students and vice versa. Though some students participate actively in class or take advantage of office hours, others remain relatively quiet and thus less familiar to faculty during the semester. More problematically, often it is the students that faculty get to know least during the semester who are precisely the ones for whom a deeper relationship with a faculty member might be most beneficial. This paper describes a simple study of the impact of two forms of personalized interventions on student performance in one section of a quantitative course at the Harvard Kennedy School. How might faculty effectively engage students in large classes, such as core classes, where students may have relatively little interaction with the teacher? Do low-cost interventions early in the semester improve such engagement and, potentially, student performance?Publication Can States Take Over and Turn Around School Districts? Evidence from Lawrence, Massachusetts(National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016) Schueler, Beth; Goodman, Joshua; Deming, DavidThe Federal government has spent billions of dollars to support turnarounds of low-achieving schools, yet most evidence on the impact of such turnarounds comes from high-profile, exceptional settings and not from examples driven by state policy decisions at scale. In this paper, we study the impact of state takeover and district-level turnaround in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Takeover of the Lawrence Public School (LPS) district was driven by the state’s accountability system, which increases state control in response to chronic underperformance. We find that the first two years of the LPS turnaround produced large achievement gains in math and modest gains in reading. Our preferred estimates compare LPS to other low income school districts in a differences-in-differences framework, although the results are robust to a wide variety of specifications, including student fixed effects. While the LPS turnaround was a package of interventions that cannot be fully separated, we find evidence that intensive small-group instruction led to particularly large achievement gains for participating students.Publication Access to 4-Year Public Colleges and Degree Completion(University of Chicago Press, 2017) Goodman, Joshua; Hurwitz, Michael; Smith, JonathanDoes access to 4-year colleges affect degree completion for students who would otherwise attend 2-year colleges? Admission to Georgia’s 4-year public sector requires minimum SAT scores. Regression discontinuity estimates show that access to this sector increases 4-year college enrollment and college quality, largely by diverting students from 2-year colleges. Access substantially increases bachelor’s degree completion rates for these relatively low-skilled students. SAT retaking behavior suggests students value access to 4-year public colleges, though perhaps less than they should. Our results imply that absolute college quality matters more than match quality, and they suggest potential unintended consequences of free community college proposals.Publication Intensive College Counseling and the Enrollment and Persistence of Low-Income Students(MIT Press - Journals, 2016) Castleman, Benjamin; Goodman, JoshuaThough counseling is one commonly pursued intervention to improve college enrollment and completion for disadvantaged students, there is relatively little causal evidence on its efficacy. We study the impact of intensive college counseling provided to college-seeking, low income students by a Massachusetts program that admits applicants partly on the basis of a minimum GPA requirement. We utilize a regression discontinuity design comparing students just above and below this threshold and find that counseling successfully shifts enrollment toward four-year colleges encouraged by the program, which are largely public and substantially less expensive than alternatives students would otherwise choose. Counseling appears to improve persistence through the third year of college, with particularly large impacts on female students and those who speak English at home. The evidence suggests potential for intensive college counseling to improve degree completion rates for disadvantaged students.Publication Intensive Math Instruction and Educational Attainment(University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) Cortes, Kalena E.; Goodman, Joshua; Nomi, TakakoWe study an intensive math instruction policy that assigned low-skilled 9th graders to an algebra course that doubled instructional time, altered peer composition and emphasized problem solving skills. A regression discontinuity design shows substantial positive impacts of double-dose algebra on credits earned, test scores, high school graduation and college enrollment rates. Test score effects under-predict attainment effects, highlighting the importance of long-run evaluation of such a policy. Perhaps because the intervention focused on verbal exposition of mathematical concepts, the impact was largest for students with below average reading skills, emphasizing the need to target interventions toward appropriately skilled students.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 Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?(2016) Goodman, Joshua; Melkers, Julia; Pallais, AmandaThough online technology has generated excitement about its potential to increase access to education, most research has focused on comparing student performance across online and inperson formats. We provide the first evidence that online education affects the number of people pursuing formal education. We study Georgia Tech’s Online M.S. in Computer Science, the earliest model to combine the inexpensive nature of online education with a highly-ranked degree program. Regression discontinuity estimates exploiting an admissions threshold unknown to applicants show that access to this online option substantially increases overall enrollment in formal education, expanding the pool of students rather than substituting for existing educational options. Demand for the online option is driven by mid-career Americans. By satisfying large, previously unmet demand for mid-career training, this single program will boost annual production of American computer science master’s degrees by about seven percent. More generally, these results suggest that low-cost, high-quality online options may open opportunities for populations who would not otherwise pursue education.Publication Flaking Out: Student Absences and Snow Days as Disruptions of Instructional Time(2014) Goodman, JoshuaDespite the fact that the average American student is absent more than two weeks out of every school year, most research on the effect of instructional time has focused not on attendance but on the length of the school day or year. Student and school fixed effects models using Massachusetts data show a strong relationship between student absences and achievement but no impact of lost instructional time due to school closures. I confirm those findings in instrumental variables models exploiting the fact that moderate snowfall induces student absences while extreme snowfall induces school closures. Prior work ignoring this non-linearity may have mis-attributed the effect of absences to such snow days. Each absence induced by bad weather reduces math achievement by 0.05 standard deviations, suggesting that attendance can account for up to one-fourth of the achievement gap by income. That absences matter but closures do not is consistent with a model of instruction in which coordination of students is the central challenge, as in Lazear (2001). Teachers appear to deal well with coordinated disruptions of instructional time like snow days but deal poorly with disruptions like absences that affect different students at different times.Publication The labor of division: returns to compulsory high school math coursework.(2017) Goodman, JoshuaDespite great focus on and public investment in STEM education, little causal evidence connects quantitative coursework to students’ economic outcomes. I show that state changes in minimum high school math requirements substantially increase black students’ completed math coursework and their later earnings. The marginal student’s return to an additional math course is 10 percent, roughly half the return to a year of high school, and is partly explained by a shift toward more cognitively skilled occupations. Whites’ coursework and earnings are unaffected. Rigorous standards for quantitative coursework can close meaningful portions of racial gaps in economic outcomes.