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Riley Acton

Riley Acton, Jo Al Khafaji-King, Austin Smith.

We examine the impact of local labor market shocks and state unemployment insurance (UI) policies on student discipline in U.S. public schools. Analyzing school-level discipline data and firm-level layoffs in 23 states, we find that layoffs have little effect on discipline rates overall. However, effects differ across the UI benefit distribution. At the lowest benefit level ($265/week), a mass layoff increases out-of-school suspensions by 4.5%, with effects dissipating as UI benefits increase. Effects are consistently largest for Black students - especially in predominantly White schools - resulting in increased racial disproportionality in school discipline following layoffs in low-UI states.

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Riley Acton, Cody Orr, Salem Rogers.

We study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin’s Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased spending in eligible districts by 2% annually and that districts primarily allocated funds to areas with low baseline budget shares. This increased spending has little effect on standardized test scores, but modestly increases college enrollment and completion for students with a low likelihood of attending or completing college.

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Riley Acton.

In the competitive U.S. higher education market, institutions differentiate themselves to attract both students and tuition dollars. One understudied example of this differentiation is the increasing trend of "colleges" becoming "universities" by changing their names. Leveraging variation in the timing of such conversions in an event study framework, I show that becoming a university increases enrollments at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, which leads to an increase in degree production and total revenues. I further find that these effects are largest when institutions are the first in their market to convert to a university and can lead to negative spillover effects on non-converting colleges.

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Riley Acton, Scott Imberman, Michael F. Lovenheim.

Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation even though they often interact closely with each other. Given the immense recent changes to health insurance systems, there is much potential for spillover effects to other systems in which health plays a large role. In this study, we examine how health insurance interacts with education, specifically the education of students with disabilities. We present the first analysis in the literature of how a mandate for health insurers to cover therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) up to age 18 affects educational services received by, and test scores of, students with ASD. A key aspect of the mandate is that children covered by Medicaid aged out of benefits quickly (by age 6), leaving them with a far weaker benefit than children covered by private insurance. Since we do not observe insurance status directly, we proxy for private insurance coverage using ineligibility for free/reduced-price lunch (FRPL) and estimate impacts on identification with ASD, special education services, and achievement through a series of difference-in-differences and triple difference models. We find little evidence of an overall shift in ASD identification, but we do find substantial crowd-out of special education services for students with ASD from the mandate. The stronger mandate led to increased mainstreaming of students in general education classrooms and a reduction in special education support services like teacher consultants. Girls in particular are more likely to be mainstreamed. There is little evidence of changes in achievement, which supports our interpretation of the service reductions as crowd-out.

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