Working Paper | With Tran, H.
This paper has been presented at:
This study explores the impact of anti-discrimination policies on job satisfaction and retention of teachers, shedding light on their crucial role in fostering diversity and inclusion within education systems.
This study examines the effects of state-legislated LGBT anti-discrimination policies on teacher turnover and job satisfaction. We utilize a nationally representative data and an extended difference-in-differences design – Two-way Mundlak method. The results demonstrate that such policies significantly reduce turnover and increase job satisfaction. Accounting for the potential factors affecting the adoption of these policies and using an instrumental variable method, we show the robustness of the results. The analysis reveals varying effects across different teacher demographic subgroups, experience levels, school sectors, and types of policies, underscoring the importance of targeted interventions to foster inclusive environments. These findings have implications for policymakers, educational institutions, and advocates of LGBT rights.
Working Paper | With Tran, H. and Smith, D.
The purpose of this paper is to show how rural teacher staffing challenges are systemically perpetuated by both geographic factors and systemic underinvestment in rural schools. The study is focused on a case from South Carolina’s most rural and impoverished districts involved in the “Abbeville vs. South Carolina” school funding lawsuit. Initiated in 1993, the Abbeville lawsuit aimed to redress school funding equity and adequacy. These districts secured a partial court victory in 2005 and another in 2014. Yet, by 2017, the lawsuit was dismissed. Critics decry the sustained underfunding and systemic disadvantages for these districts, while the state emphasizes the many improvements since the lawsuit’s start. We aim to understand staffing challenges in rural contexts through interviews with district leadership, teachers, and principals (n=17). The study examines the role of rural school funding underinvestment in perpetuating these challenges using an event study of funding changes after the only financial ruling for the plaintiff districts in the lawsuit. Then, we investigate the impact and effectiveness of state interventions against the backdrop of continued underinvestment utilizing the Rural Recruitment Initiatives (RRI) program. The results of the event study of the effect of court case on narrowing the revenue gap between the plaintiff and non-plaintiff districts indicate that plaintiff districts have consistently statistically and practically significantly lower revenue than their non-plaintiff counterparts, with this effect increasing over time. We also show that an additional $10,000 disbursement is associated with 0.06% less teacher turnover in the eligible districts. In an average district with over $109,000 disbursement, the turnover decreases by 0.65% (about 2.9 teachers in an average district with 445 teachers). In short, our study addresses why the problem of rural teacher shortages exists and why the problem persists.
Working Paper | With Mahyar Ebrahimitorki
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The behavior of participants in a market is considerably affected by new firm entries and the introduction of new (and sometimes differentiated) products. In this paper, we examine how encroaching marketplace (MP) lenders would impact the traditional banks’ loan pricing in the unsecured consumer loan market. Filling this void in the literature is important because low-cost financing of individual expenditures by MP lenders can contribute to stimulating consumption from households and affect the real economy. A difference in differences (DID) model with an endogenous entry is used to elucidate the main goal of this study. To address the endogeneity of entry, I define two instrumental variables (IV) and estimate an IV-DID model. According to the increased demand scenario and “service agglomeration”, heterogeneous lending firms cause an increasing pricing response to the entry. Additionally, banks, distinguished by their sizes, have heterogenous pricing responses to the entry.