Cassandra Merritt

Abstract:  This paper studies the role of course offerings as an alternative curricular intervention to raise math attainment through the roll-out of newly developed 12th grade math courses across California high schools. With the state census of secondary course records from 2014 to 2019, I exploit the externally driven implementation of "Advanced Innovation Math" courses as 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 insignificant effects (less than 1 percentage point), on average, for 4-year university enrollment and persistence into a second year. I show with a conceptual model that increased attainment with a null persistence effect implies more learning across the 12th grade math curriculum for college-goers. These effects are not coincident with changes in the composition of the student body or school staff, average class sizes, or attainment of other subjects. Subgroup analysis shows math attainment increases equally across the student body, whereas increases in 4-year university enrollment are concentrated in students that the new courses target while university persistence falls for academically advanced students.  

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.