Highlighted Publications




 

Mbekeani, Papay, Mantil, and Murnane (2026) examine how much high schools affect students’ long-term outcomes, including college enrollment, graduation, and earnings. They use longitudinal data from Massachusetts following five cohorts of ninth-grade students, combining administrative records and survey data. They find large differences across schools: students attending higher value-added schools are 11% more likely to enroll in college, 31% more likely to graduate from a fo

Chan and Chen (2025) examine how the productivity of nurse practitioners compares to physicians in emergency departments. They study 1.1 million patient visits from Veterans Health Administration emergency departments, using quasi-random assignment of patients to providers. They find that nurse practitioners use more resources, increasing length of stay by about 11 percent and costs by 7 percent. They also raise 30-day preventable hospitalizations by roughly 20 percent, with

Nelissen and De Witte (2026) examine whether raising the compulsory schooling age from 17 to 18 improves long-term educational and labor market outcomes. They use Dutch administrative microdata tracking individuals from adolescence into adulthood, exploiting a quasi-experimental reform. They find the policy reduced dropout by about 1.3 percentage points and increased high school completion by roughly 0.5 points, with stronger effects for vocational students. By age 31, employ

Singer (2026) examines whether the duration of remote learning in 2020–21 affected student attendance after the pandemic. He uses longitudinal administrative data on nearly one million Michigan students from 2017–18 through 2023–24, combined with district-level measures of remote learning duration. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables, he finds that each additional month of remote learning reduced post-pandemic attendance by about 0.46 percentage points.