David Deming's Papers

Better Schools, Less Crime?(Job Market Paper)

Abstract: I estimate the effect of attending a first-choice middle or high school on young adult criminal activity, using data from public school choice lotteries in Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district (CMS). Seven years after random assignment, lottery winners have been arrested for fewer and less serious crimes, and have spent fewer days incarcerated. Lottery winners attended schools that were higher quality according to measures of peer and teacher inputs, as well as revealed preference, and the gain was roughly equivalent to switching from one of the lowest ranked schools to one at the district average. The reduction in crime persists through the end of the sample period, several years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete. The effects are concentrated among African-American males whose ex ante characteristics define them as “high risk.” As a result the CMS lottery assignment system, which gave priority to disadvantaged applicants, probably reduced crime relative to a simple lottery like those implemented by many U.S. charter schools.

Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start. 2009. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(3): 111-34.
This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I compare siblings who differ in their participation in the program, controlling for a variety of pre-treatment covariates. I estimate that Head Start participants gain 0.23 standard deviations on a summary index of young adult outcomes. This closes one third of the gap between children with median and bottom quartile family income, and is about 80 percent as large as model programs such as Perry Preschool. The long-term impact for disadvantaged children is large despite “fade out” of test score gains.

The Lengthening of Childhood (with Susan Dynarski). 2008. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(3): 71-92.

This paper was featured in the 2008 New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas Issue.
Into College, Out of Poverty? Policies to Increase the Postsecondary Attainment of the Poor (with Susan Dynarski). in Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources are Limited, Philip Levine and David Zimmerman (eds.), University of Chicago Press (forthcoming).

School Choice and College Attendance: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries (with Justine Hastings, Tom Kane and Doug Staiger)
In 2002, Charlotte Mecklenburg school district implemented an open enrollment policy that allocated slots at oversubscribed schools via random lottery. To assess the impact of gaining admission to a highly demanded high school, we match administrative data from the district to the National Student Clearinghouse, a national administrative database of postsecondary enrollment. We find strong evidence that high school lottery winners from neighborhoods assigned to the lowest-performing schools benefited greatly from choice. Girls are 12 percentage points more likely to attend a four-year college. Boys are 13 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school but are less likely to attend a four-year college. We present suggestive evidence that changes in relative rank within schools may explain these puzzling gender differences. In contrast with the results for students from low-performing home school zones, we find little evidence of gains for students whose home schools are of average quality.
Schooling and the Antecedents of Crime
Evaluating School Performance by Long-Term Measures of Student Outcomes