Cassandra Merritt

Abstract: The roll-out of newly developed 12th grade mathematics courses across California high schools provides an opportunity to evaluate an alternative curricular intervention aimed at raising math attainment. With the state census of secondary course records from 2014 to 2019, I exploit the externally driven implementation of "Advanced Innovation Math" courses as a source of exogenous variation in course offerings to identify the intervention’s intended effect on math attainment and implications for overall curricular quality. An event-study reveals students exposed to a new course are 5 percentage points more likely to take math in 12th grade and null effects on 4-year university enrollment and persistence into a second year. A conceptual model shows that this persistence result can suggest more learning across the 12th grade math curriculum for college-goers. These effects are not coincident with detected changes in the composition of the student body or school staff, average class sizes, or attainment of other subjects. The math attainment and postsecondary effects are stable across demographically and academically based subgroups. 

Abstract: The evolution of work is of emerging importance to advanced economies' growth. In this study, we develop a new semantic-distance-based algorithm to identify "new work," namely the new types of jobs introduced in the US. We characterize how "new work" relates to task content of jobs and skill characteristics of workers and document its geographic distribution and association with employment growth. Then, we analyze whether local factors associated in the previous literature with agglomeration economies and productivity growth as well as local exposures to global shocks---technology, trade, immigration, and population aging---predict the creation of "new work." We find local supply of college educated in 1980 as the strongest predictor of "new work." Using the historical location of 4-year colleges, a strong instrument for local college share, we find a positive and significant causal effect of local supply of human capital on "new work." 

NBER Working Paper
Russell Sage Foundation Grant (Future of Work, June 2023)

Abstract: The road to college has many hurdles, and the journey is an unravelling mystery for each traveller -- the right information could be crucial for post-secondary matriculation. The California College Guidance Initiative (CCGI) started rolling out data-driven guidance tools across many California school districts and charter networks from 2013 to present, and now serves as the basis for the state's Cradle-to-Career Data System initiative. A key feature of CCGI tools is integration between local school IT systems, the UC Office of the President's approved A-G course database, and California universities' application systems. California universities' admission requirements include completion of a validated A-G curriculum -- a complexity CCGI serves to alleviate. Using California Department of Education student-level K-12 data, the intent-to-treat effect of CCGI's information treatment is measured via an "event study"-esque specification. Results show weak statistically significant evidence of a 5 percentage point increase in A-G curriculum completion if the tools are available over a student's full high school tenure.