Research

Working Paper
Education

Stacking the Deck for Employment Success: Labor Market Returns to Stackable Credentials

Authors: Katharine Meyer, Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman

With rapid technological transformations to the labor market along with COVID-19 related economic disruptions, many working adults return to college to obtain additional training or credentials. Using a comparative individual fixed effects strategy and an administrative panel dataset of enrollment and employment in Virginia, we provide the first causal estimates of credential “stacking” among working adults. 

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Working Paper
Education

Pushing College Advising Forward: Experimental Evidence on Intensive Advising and College Success

Authors: Benjamin Castleman, Denise Deutschlander, Gabrielle Lohner

Growing experimental evidence demonstrates that low-touch informational, nudge, and virtual advising interventions are ineffective at improving postsecondary educational outcomes for economically-disadvantaged students at scale. Intensive in-person college advising programs are a considerably higher-touch and more resource intensive strategy; some programs provide students with dozen of hours of individualized assistance starting in high school and continuing through college, and can cost thousands of dollars per student served.

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Working Paper
Education

Nudges Don’t Work When the Benefits Are Ambiguous: Evidence from a High-Stakes Education Program

Authors: Benjamin Castleman, Francis X. Murphy, Richard W. Patterson, William L. Skimmyhorn

The Post-9/11 GI Bill allows service members to transfer generous education benefits to a dependent. We run a large scale experiment that encourages service members to consider the transfer option among a population that includes individuals for whom the transfer benefits are clear and individuals for whom the net-benefits are significantly more ambiguous. We find no impact of a one-time email about benefits transfer among service members for whom we predict considerable ambiguity in the action, but sizeable impacts among service members for whom education benefits transfer is far less ambiguous.

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Working Paper
Education

Negative Impacts From the Shift to Online Learning During the COVID-19 Crisis: Evidence from a Statewide Community College System

Authors: Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman, Gabrielle Lohner

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person to virtual instruction in Spring 2020. Using a difference-in-differences framework that leverages within-course variation on whether students started their Spring 2020 courses in person or online, we estimate the impact of this shift on the academic performance of Virginia’s community college students. We find that the shift to virtual instruction resulted in a 6.7 percentage point decrease in course completion, driven by increases in both course withdrawal and failure. Faculty experience teaching a course online did not mitigate the negative effects of moving to virtual instruction.

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Working Paper
Education

Who Should Re-enroll in College? The Academic and Labor Market Profile of Adults with Substantial College Credits But No Degree

Authors: Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin Castleman, Brett Fischer, Benjamin T. Skinner

Tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis, and a sizable share of these job losses may be permanent. Unemployment rates are particularly high among adults without a college degree. Recent state policy efforts h

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Published Research

Emerging Issues in Decentralized Resource Governance: Environmental Federalism, Spillovers, and Linked Socio-Ecological Systems

Authors: William Shobe

Federalism as an academic discipline studies how multilevel political jurisdictions interact, both vertically and horizontally. Environmental federalism shifts and expands the focus by concentrating on environmental goods, which are related to ecosystem services. This shift necessarily expands the inquiry to include investigation of how ecosystem services respond to changes in resource management by human governance institutions.

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Published Research

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in complex humanitarian crises

Authors: David Leblang, Danielle N. Poole, Daniel J. Escudero, Lawrence O. Gostin, Elizabeth A. Talbot

Over 168 million people across 50 countries are estimated to need humanitarian assistance in 2020. Response to epidemics in complex humanitarian crises— such as the recent cholera epidemic in Yemen and the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo— is a global health challenge of increasing scale. The thousands of Yemeni and Congolese who have died in these years-long epidemics demonstrate the difficulty of combatting even well-known pathogens in humanitarian settings. The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) may represent a still greater threat to those in complex humanitarian crises, which lack the infrastructure, support, and health systems to mount a comprehensive response. 

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