Publications by Year: Forthcoming

Forthcoming
Dobbie W, Fryer RG. Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes. Journal of Labor Economics. Forthcoming.Abstract

We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using admin- istrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but, due to imprecision, have a statistically insignificant impact on earnings – though the coefficient is almost identical to what one would expect given the correla- tion between test scores and wages. Other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings, and, surprisingly, the decrease in wages is more negative than one would anticipate. Using school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease average test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase average test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects and four-year college enrollment are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.

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Roland G. Fryer J, Howard-Noveck M. High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City∗. Journal of Labor Economics. Forthcoming.Abstract

This study examines the impact on student achievement of high-dosage reading tutoring for middle school students in New York City public schools, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across three years, schools offered at least 130 hours of 4-on-1 tutoring based on a guided reading model. We demonstrate that, at the mean, tutoring has a positive and significant effect on school attendance, a positive, but insignificant, effect on English Language Arts (ELA) state test scores and no effect on math state test scores. There is important heterogeneity by race. For black students, our treatment increased attendance by 2.0 percentage points (control mean 92.4 percent) and ELA scores by 0.09 standard deviations per year – two times larger than the effect of KIPP Charter Middle Schools on reading achievement. We argue that the increased effectiveness of tutoring for black students is best explained by the average tutor characteristics at the schools they attend.

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Roland G. Fryer J, Harms P, Jackson MO. Updating Beliefs when Evidence is Open to Interpretation: Implications for Bias and Polarization. Journal of the European Economic Association. Forthcoming.Abstract

We introduce a model in which agents observe signals about the state of the world, some of which are open to interpretation. Our decision makers first interpret each signal and then form a posterior on the sequence of interpreted signals. This ‘double updating’ leads to confirmation bias and can lead agents who observe the same information to polarize. We explore the model’s predictions in an on-line experiment in which individuals interpret research summaries about climate change and the death penalty. Consistent with the model, there is a significant relationship between an individual’s prior and their interpretation of the summaries; and - even more striking - over half of the subjects exhibit polarizing behavior.

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Roland G Fryer J. Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings. American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings). Forthcoming. PDF
Roland G. Fryer J. The ‘Pupil’ Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools. American Economic Review. Forthcoming.Abstract
Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, I conducted a randomized field experiment in fortysix traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization in schools. Treatment schools altered their schedules to have teachers specialize in a subset of subjects in which they have demonstrated relative strength (based on value-add measures and principal observations). The average impact of encouraging schools to specialize their teachers on student achievement is -0.11 standard deviations per year on a combined index of math and reading test scores. Students enrolled in special education and those with less experienced teachers demonstrated marked negative results. I argue that the results are consistent with a model in which the benefits of specialization driven by sorting teachers into a subset of subjects based on comparative advantage is outweighed by inefficient pedagogy due to having fewer interactions with each student, though other mechanisms are possible.
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Roland G. Fryer J. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy. Forthcoming.Abstract

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force –officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

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Cicala S, Roland G. Fryer J, Spenkuch JL. Self-Selection and Comparative Advantage in Social Interactions. Journal of the European Economic Association. Forthcoming.Abstract

We propose a theory of social interactions based on self-selection and comparative advantage. In our model, students choose peer groups based on their comparative advantage within a social environment. The effect of moving a student into a different environment with higher-achieving peers depends on where in the ability distribution she falls and the shadow prices that clear the social market. We show that the model’s key prediction—an individual’s ordinal rank predicts her behavior and test scores—is borne out in one randomized controlled trial in Kenya as well as administrative data from the U.S. To test whether our selection mechanism can explain the effect of rank on outcomes, we conduct an experiment with nearly 600 public school students in Houston. The experimental results suggest that social interactions are mediated by self-selection based on comparative advantage.

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Fryer R, Harms P. Two-Armed Restless Bandits with Imperfect Information: Stochastic Control and Indexability. Mathematics of Operations Research. Forthcoming.Abstract

 

We present a two-armed bandit model of decision making under uncertainty where the expected return to investing in the "risky arm" increases when choosing that arm and decreases when choosing the "safe" arm. These dynamics are natural in applications such as human capital development, job search, and occupational choice. Using new insights from stochastic control, along with a monotonicity condition on the payo dynamics, we show that optimal strategies in our model are stopping rules that can be characterized by an index which formally coincides with Gittins' index. Our result implies the indexability of a new class of restless bandit models

 

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