Research
Working Papers
2024
- EducationFour-day School Week, Student Achievements, and Teacher Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from ColoradoOzkan Eren, Meng Song, and Ruinan Zhao2024
The four-day school week policy has gained increased attention among school districts in recent years. While existing literature has examined its effects on primary school students’ test scores, health, and risky behaviors in the short run, the impacts on high school students and teachers remain unclear. Utilizing administrative data of students and teachers, we leverage the quasi-randomness of the four-day school week implementation and employ a difference-in-difference approach to explore the causal impacts of the four-day school week on high school students’ academic achievements and teacher labor market outcomes. Our findings reveal that the adoption of the 4-day school week increases dropout rates, reduce freshman college enrollment, but has no statistically significant impact on on-time graduation rates. We further illustrate the policy impacts on teacher retention, recruitment, and productivity. Additionally, we present suggestive evidence that the duration of exposure to the four-day school week, along with the implementation strategy, play an important role in influencing both student and teacher outcomes.
- LaborThe Effect of Job Flexibility on Female Labor Force ParticipationMeng Song2024
This paper posits that job flexibility may be a significant factor influencing women’s decisions to participate in the labor force. The aim is to explore the relationship between job flexibility and FLFP, to understand how job flexibility can be leveraged to not only attract more women into the workforce but also to ensure their continued participation and advancement. I plan to create a more robust measure of job flexibility that accounts for both temporal and spatial flexibility, potentially using a combination of annual CPS data and O*NET’s detailed job characteristics. This new measure will be incorporated into a regression model using principal component analysis (PCA) and a shift-share instrument to estimate the impact of job flexibility on female labor force participation.