Publications

This paper studies the impact of capital projects on student learning and the real estate market,
using nationwide data on U.S. school districts and focusing on what investments work and on
whom. We use newly collected data on school capital bonds, test scores, and house prices for 28
U.S. states and a new research design that identifies the causal impact of bond authorizations in
the presence of dynamic and heterogeneous treatment effects. On average, bond authorization
significantly raises test scores and house prices. Yet, there are large differences across bonds and
districts. Spending on infrastructure renovation and upgrades, such as HVAC or roofs, raises
test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities increases house prices
but not test scores. Bond authorization is most beneficial in districts with more disadvantaged
student populations, in part because these districts prioritize bonds that improve learning. We
find suggestive evidence that capital funding rules drive differences in bond impacts.

After confronting the myths sur- rounding momentum investing1 and value investing,2 we realized two things: 1) We had passed over the first anomaly discovered in academic finance and the one that had been around the longest—size, and 2) despite its longevity and the attention it has received, there is still much confusion and debate surrounding the size anomaly.

This paper tests whether defined-benefits (DB) pensions are as effective as salaries in retaining employees by estimating and comparing workers’ extensive-margin labor supply responses to these two forms of compensations. To distinguish between these responses, I study the retire- ment behavior of teachers in Wisconsin around the passage of Act 10, a budget-saving reform that cut salaries and DB pensions with staggered timing across teachers and school districts. I use a life-cycle model of consumption and retirement to estimate responses to changes in these forms of compensation and find that teachers respond four times less to changes in pensions than to changes in salaries of the same size along the substitution margin. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that 800 additional teachers (11% of all retirement-eligible teachers) would have been retained in Wisconsin had the state opted for cutting pensions rather than salaries.