With growing evidence of heat impairing student learning, a potential policy solution is clearly investing in air-conditioning. We analyze the impact of a $135 million AC installation program undertaken by Chicago Public Schools between 2013–2017 on student outcomes, leveraging the timing of roll-out of AC across schools. We find no evidence of improved students' end-of-year test scores or grade retention, and find marginal improvements in attendance. These results indicate that improvements in test scores (or other student outcomes) with AC installation could be region-dependent with the impacts of heat on learning, and considering the returns can help school districts better optimize their often limited budgets to improve student performance.
U.S. states deregulated their banking sectors in a staggered fashion between 1960-1999, increasing efficiency through competition between banks and boosting economic growth within a state. We find that deregulated states saw their fertility rates decrease post-deregulation using a classic difference-in-differences strategy. In updating our results with recent econometric literature to account for differences in treatment timing in a two-way fixed effect model, we find that our results are robust for the sample of observations before 1989 but not for later years. Women aged 20-44 saw a decrease of approximately 2-3% in average fertility rates post-deregulation between 1970 and 1988. We hypothesize that a likely mechanism could be the increased opportunity costs of having children in a growing job market for women, especially in non-white and poorer households.
World War II saw an unprecedented influx of women onto factory floors. While most previous literature in this area focuses on the impacts of WWII military mobilization, recent work highlights the importance of the war production effort in increasing female wartime employment (Rose, 2018; Shatnawi and Fishback, 2018). I estimate the impact of state-wide and industry-wide changes in production demand for manufacturing during WWII on relative wages for women in 1950.
In Durable Manufacturing, where fewer than 10% of the workforce was female in 1940, wages for women in 1950 increased by 35% compared to 1940, in the sub-industry with the largest change in the relative demand for women during WWII. In contrast, relative wages did not rise for women in Non-Durable Manufacturing, where women already comprised nearly 40% of the workforce prior to WWII.
I motivate a simple model where male and female labor act as imperfect substitutes and suggest that the gains in relative wages for women in Durable Manufacturing could come from changes in the actual or perceived relative labor productivity for women in male-dominated industries. The relative wage gains are highest for women with 12 or more years of education, suggesting some women were allowed a “foot in the door” into prized manufacturing jobs due to the war production effort. My results provide an interesting new context on relative wage gains for women via industrial composition in a much-studied setting.