Douglas O Staiger
Biographic Data
| ID | 1455486 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Douglas O Staiger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Douglas |
| FAMILY NAME | O Staiger |
| SIGNATURE | STAIGER D O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Dartmouth College |
| ORCID | 0009-0005-4711-2629 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Impacts of Academic Recovery Interventions on Student Achievement in 2022 to 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic caused large, persistent declines in student achievement. This paper examines 2022–2023 recovery efforts across eight districts, including tutoring, small-group instruction, after-school, extended year, double-dose, digital learning, and expert teacher interventions. The study includes 12 math programs and 15 literacy programs (three covered both subjects). Most served fewer students and provided lower dosage than planned. U…
Lifting Up Attendance in Rural Districts
Student absenteeism has remained high following the COVID-19 pandemic, and districts need low-cost strategies to improve attendance. During the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 school years, the National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN) conducted a randomized trial of a personalized messaging intervention that had promising results in an early pilot with eight rural districts. NCRERN worked with a student information system to test th…
School District and Community Factors Associated with Test Score Declines During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Using data from approximately 7,800 school districts, we show that test score declines during the pandemic were large and highly variable. We find that test score declines were larger in lower-income and minority districts, but that within districts, White students and non–economically disadvantaged students lost about the same amount of ground as Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. We find that the test score declines were …
What do changes in state Naep scores imply for birth cohorts’ later life outcomes
Since 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been the primary benchmark for tracking the progress of state education reform. The focus on math and reading achievement is motivated by the cross‐sectional relationship between test scores and adult outcomes, such as earnings and college completion. But do changes in NAEP scores predict changes in long‐term economic and social outcomes for future earners—or do they reflect o…
Summer School as a Learning Loss Recovery Strategy After Covid-19
To make up for pandemic-related learning losses, many U.S. public school districts have increased enrollment in their summer school programs. We assessed summer school as a strategy for COVID-19 learning recovery by tracking the academic progress of students who attended summer school in 2022 across eight districts serving 400,000 students. Using value-added models that control for students’ demographics and prior achievement, we estimated a posi…
Projecting the Future Registered Nurse Workforce After the Covid-19 Pandemic
In this study, the rebound in the total size of the US RN workforce during 2022 and 2023 indicates that the earlier drop in RN employment during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic was likely transitory. Updated forecasts of the future RN workforce are very close to those made before the pandemic
Characteristics of rural registered nurses and the implications for workforce policy
PURPOSE: Rural registered nurses (RNs) play an integral role in providing care for an underserved population with worse health outcomes than urban counterparts. However, little information is available on the profile of this workforce, which is necessary to understand the capacity of these nurses to provide quality and demanded care presently and in the future. METHODS: We utilize data from the American Community Survey to provide a contemporary …
Marriage, Children, and Sex-Based Differences in Physician Hours and Income
In this cross-sectional study of US physicians, marriage and children were associated with a greater earnings penalty for female physicians, primarily due to fewer hours worked relative to men. Addressing the barriers that lead to women working fewer hours could contribute to a reduction in the male-female earnings gap while helping to expand the effective physician workforce
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
School District Reform in Newark
In the 2011-12 school year, the Newark Public School district (NPS) launched a set of educational reforms supported by a gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Using data from 2008-09 through 2015-16, the authors evaluate the change in Newark students' achievement growth relative to similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey. They measure achievement growth using a "value-added" model, controlling for prior achieveme…
Technology Diffusion and Productivity Growth in Health Care
We draw on macroeconomic models of diffusion and productivity to explain empirical patterns of survival gains in heart attacks. Using Medicare data for 2.8 million patients during 1986-2004, we find that hospitals rapidly adopting cost-effective innovations such as beta blockers, aspirin, and reperfusion, had substantially better outcomes for their patients. Holding technology adoption constant, the marginal returns to spending were relatively mo…
Will the RN Workforce Weather the Retirement of the Baby Boomers
IMPORTANCE: After forecasts made more than a decade ago suggested dire nursing shortages, enrollment in nursing schools doubled. The implications of this unprecedented change for the nursing workforce have not yet been fully explored. OBJECTIVE: To forecast the size and age distribution of the nursing workforce to the year 2030 and to compare to demand recently projected by the Health Resources and Services Agency. DESIGN: A retrospective cohort …
Composite Quality Measures for Common Inpatient Medical Conditions
Composite measures of quality for HF, AMI, and PNA performed better than existing measures at explaining variation in future mortality and predicting future high and low performers
Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?
Research on the relationship between teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of nontraditional predictors of effectiveness, including teaching-specific conten…
Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information
Over the past four decades, empirical researchers-many of them economists-have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and retain teachers. We begin by summarizing the evidence on five key points, referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation's two largest school districts: L…
Abortion and Selection
Abortion legalization in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility. Some research has suggested that it altered cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding selection mechanisms and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results indicate th…
Empirically Derived Composite Measures of Surgical Performance
BACKGROUND: Individual quality measures have significant limitations for assessing surgical performance. Despite growing interest in composite measures, empirically-based methods for combining multiple domains of surgical quality are not well established. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a composite measure of surgical performance that best describes variation in hospital mortality rates and forecasts future performance. RESEARCH DESIGN: Using …
What does certification tell us about teacher effectiveness? Evidence from New York City
Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement
We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant predictors of student …
Productivity Spillovers in Health Care
A large literature in medicine documents variation across areas in the use of surgical treatments that is unrelated to outcomes. Observers of this phenomena have invoked "flat of the curve medicine" to explain these facts, and have advocated for reductions in spending in high-use areas. In contrast, we develop a simple Roy model of patient treatment choice with productivity spillovers that can generate the empirical facts. Our model predicts that…
Are Mortality Rates for Different Operations Related
BACKGROUND: Except in cardiac surgery, measuring quality with procedure-specific mortality rates is unreliable because of small sample sizes at individual hospitals. Statistical power can be improved by combining mortality data from multiple operations. We sought to determine whether this approach would still be useful in understanding performance with individual procedures. METHODS: We studied 11 high-risk operations performed in the national Me…
Parental Preferences and School Competition
This paper uses school choice data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District to study parents' preferences for school characteristics and their implications for demand and competition in school choice. We estimate a mixed-logit demand model using the rankings of parents' top three school choices in the first year of school choice. Our results show that parents value proximity highly and preferences for school test scores increase with studen…
Mortality Among Very Low-Birthweight Infants in Hospitals Serving Minority Populations
Objective. We investigated whether the proportion of Black very low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants treated by hospitals is associated with neonatal mortality for Black and White VLBW infants. Methods. We analyzed medical records linked to secondary data sources for 74050 Black and White VLBW infants (501 g to 1500 g) treated by 332 hospitals participating in the Vermont Oxford Network from 1995 to 2000. Hospitals where more than 35% of VLBW infants …
Hospital-Level Racial Disparities in Acute Myocardial Infarction Treatment and Outcomes
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have documented racial disparities in treatment of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) among Medicare beneficiaries. However, the extent to which unobserved differences between hospitals explains some of these differences is unknown. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether the observed racial treatment disparities for AMI narrow when analyses account for differences in where blacks and whites are…
The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures
In recent years, most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school-level test scores. However, because the median elementary school contains only 69 children per grade level, such measures are quite imprecise. We evaluate the implications for school accountability systems. For instance, rewards or sanctions for schools with scores at either extreme primarily affect small schools and provide weak incentives to large ones. …
The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures
In recent years, most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school-level test scores. However, because the median elementary school contains only 69 children per grade level, such measures are quite imprecise. We evaluate the implications for school accountability systems. For instance, rewards or sanctions for schools with scores at either extreme primarily affect small schools and provide weak incentives to large ones. …
Roe v Wade and American fertility
OBJECTIVES: This article examines the effect of abortion legalization on fertility rates in the United States. METHODS: Fertility rates were compared over time between states that varied in the timing of abortion legalization. RESULTS: States legalizing abortion experienced a 4% decline in fertility relative to states where the legal status of abortion was unchanged. The relative reductions in births to teens, women more than 35 years of age, non…
Productivity Spillovers in Health Care
A large literature in medicine documents variation across areas in the use of surgical treatments that is unrelated to outcomes. Observers of this phenomena have invoked "flat of the curve medicine" to explain these facts, and have advocated for reductions in spending in high-use areas. In contrast, we develop a simple Roy model of patient treatment choice with productivity spillovers that can generate the empirical facts. Our model predicts that…
Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information
Over the past four decades, empirical researchers-many of them economists-have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and retain teachers. We begin by summarizing the evidence on five key points, referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation's two largest school districts: L…
The Nairu, Unemployment and Monetary Policy
This paper examines the precision of conventional estimates of the NAIRU and the role of the NAIRU and unemployment in forecasting inflation. The authors find that, although there is a clear empirical Phillips relation, the NAIRU is imprecisely estimated, forecasts of inflation are insensitive to the NAIRU, and there are other leading indicators of inflation that are at least as good as unemployment. This suggests deemphasizing the NAIRU in publi…
Mortality Among Very Low-Birthweight Infants in Hospitals Serving Minority Populations
Objective. We investigated whether the proportion of Black very low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants treated by hospitals is associated with neonatal mortality for Black and White VLBW infants. Methods. We analyzed medical records linked to secondary data sources for 74050 Black and White VLBW infants (501 g to 1500 g) treated by 332 hospitals participating in the Vermont Oxford Network from 1995 to 2000. Hospitals where more than 35% of VLBW infants …
School District Reform in Newark
In the 2011-12 school year, the Newark Public School district (NPS) launched a set of educational reforms supported by a gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Using data from 2008-09 through 2015-16, the authors evaluate the change in Newark students' achievement growth relative to similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey. They measure achievement growth using a "value-added" model, controlling for prior achieveme…
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
What do changes in state Naep scores imply for birth cohorts’ later life outcomes
Since 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been the primary benchmark for tracking the progress of state education reform. The focus on math and reading achievement is motivated by the cross‐sectional relationship between test scores and adult outcomes, such as earnings and college completion. But do changes in NAEP scores predict changes in long‐term economic and social outcomes for future earners—or do they reflect o…
Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments
This paper develops asymptotic distribution theory for instrumental variable regression when the partial correlation between the instruments and a single included endogenous variable is weak, here modeled as local to zero. Asymptotic representations are provided for various instrumental variable statistics, including the two-stage least squares (TSLS) and limited information maximum- likelihood (LIML) estimators and their t-statistics. The asympt…
The Nairu, Unemployment and Monetary Policy
This paper examines the precision of conventional estimates of the NAIRU and the role of the NAIRU and unemployment in forecasting inflation. The authors find that, although there is a clear empirical Phillips relation, the NAIRU is imprecisely estimated, forecasts of inflation are insensitive to the NAIRU, and there are other leading indicators of inflation that are at least as good as unemployment. This suggests deemphasizing the NAIRU in publi…
Roe v Wade and American fertility
OBJECTIVES: This article examines the effect of abortion legalization on fertility rates in the United States. METHODS: Fertility rates were compared over time between states that varied in the timing of abortion legalization. RESULTS: States legalizing abortion experienced a 4% decline in fertility relative to states where the legal status of abortion was unchanged. The relative reductions in births to teens, women more than 35 years of age, non…
The Promise and Pitfalls of Using Imprecise School Accountability Measures
In recent years, most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school-level test scores. However, because the median elementary school contains only 69 children per grade level, such measures are quite imprecise. We evaluate the implications for school accountability systems. For instance, rewards or sanctions for schools with scores at either extreme primarily affect small schools and provide weak incentives to large ones. …
Parental Preferences and School Competition
This paper uses school choice data from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District to study parents' preferences for school characteristics and their implications for demand and competition in school choice. We estimate a mixed-logit demand model using the rankings of parents' top three school choices in the first year of school choice. Our results show that parents value proximity highly and preferences for school test scores increase with studen…
Mortality Among Very Low-Birthweight Infants in Hospitals Serving Minority Populations
Objective. We investigated whether the proportion of Black very low-birth-weight (VLBW) infants treated by hospitals is associated with neonatal mortality for Black and White VLBW infants. Methods. We analyzed medical records linked to secondary data sources for 74050 Black and White VLBW infants (501 g to 1500 g) treated by 332 hospitals participating in the Vermont Oxford Network from 1995 to 2000. Hospitals where more than 35% of VLBW infants …
Hospital-Level Racial Disparities in Acute Myocardial Infarction Treatment and Outcomes
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have documented racial disparities in treatment of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) among Medicare beneficiaries. However, the extent to which unobserved differences between hospitals explains some of these differences is unknown. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine whether the observed racial treatment disparities for AMI narrow when analyses account for differences in where blacks and whites are…
Are Mortality Rates for Different Operations Related
BACKGROUND: Except in cardiac surgery, measuring quality with procedure-specific mortality rates is unreliable because of small sample sizes at individual hospitals. Statistical power can be improved by combining mortality data from multiple operations. We sought to determine whether this approach would still be useful in understanding performance with individual procedures. METHODS: We studied 11 high-risk operations performed in the national Me…
Productivity Spillovers in Health Care
A large literature in medicine documents variation across areas in the use of surgical treatments that is unrelated to outcomes. Observers of this phenomena have invoked "flat of the curve medicine" to explain these facts, and have advocated for reductions in spending in high-use areas. In contrast, we develop a simple Roy model of patient treatment choice with productivity spillovers that can generate the empirical facts. Our model predicts that…
What does certification tell us about teacher effectiveness? Evidence from New York City
Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement
We used a random-assignment experiment in Los Angeles Unified School District to evaluate various non-experimental methods for estimating teacher effects on student test scores. Having estimated teacher effects during a pre-experimental period, we used these estimates to predict student achievement following random assignment of teachers to classrooms. While all of the teacher effect estimates we considered were significant predictors of student …
Abortion and Selection
Abortion legalization in the early 1970s led to dramatic changes in fertility. Some research has suggested that it altered cohort outcomes, but this literature has been limited and controversial. In this paper, we provide a framework for understanding selection mechanisms and use that framework to both address inconsistent past methodological approaches and provide evidence on the long-run impact on cohort characteristics. Our results indicate th…
Empirically Derived Composite Measures of Surgical Performance
BACKGROUND: Individual quality measures have significant limitations for assessing surgical performance. Despite growing interest in composite measures, empirically-based methods for combining multiple domains of surgical quality are not well established. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a composite measure of surgical performance that best describes variation in hospital mortality rates and forecasts future performance. RESEARCH DESIGN: Using …
Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information
Over the past four decades, empirical researchers-many of them economists-have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and retain teachers. We begin by summarizing the evidence on five key points, referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation's two largest school districts: L…
Can You Recognize an Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?
Research on the relationship between teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness has been underway for over a century, yet little progress has been made in linking teacher quality with factors observable at the time of hire. To extend this literature, we administered an in-depth survey to new math teachers in New York City and collected information on a number of nontraditional predictors of effectiveness, including teaching-specific conten…
Composite Quality Measures for Common Inpatient Medical Conditions
Composite measures of quality for HF, AMI, and PNA performed better than existing measures at explaining variation in future mortality and predicting future high and low performers
Technology Diffusion and Productivity Growth in Health Care
We draw on macroeconomic models of diffusion and productivity to explain empirical patterns of survival gains in heart attacks. Using Medicare data for 2.8 million patients during 1986-2004, we find that hospitals rapidly adopting cost-effective innovations such as beta blockers, aspirin, and reperfusion, had substantially better outcomes for their patients. Holding technology adoption constant, the marginal returns to spending were relatively mo…
Will the RN Workforce Weather the Retirement of the Baby Boomers
IMPORTANCE: After forecasts made more than a decade ago suggested dire nursing shortages, enrollment in nursing schools doubled. The implications of this unprecedented change for the nursing workforce have not yet been fully explored. OBJECTIVE: To forecast the size and age distribution of the nursing workforce to the year 2030 and to compare to demand recently projected by the Health Resources and Services Agency. DESIGN: A retrospective cohort …
School District Reform in Newark
In the 2011-12 school year, the Newark Public School district (NPS) launched a set of educational reforms supported by a gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Using data from 2008-09 through 2015-16, the authors evaluate the change in Newark students' achievement growth relative to similar students and schools elsewhere in New Jersey. They measure achievement growth using a "value-added" model, controlling for prior achieveme…
Curriculum Reform in The Common Core Era
Can a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we fo…
Characteristics of rural registered nurses and the implications for workforce policy
PURPOSE: Rural registered nurses (RNs) play an integral role in providing care for an underserved population with worse health outcomes than urban counterparts. However, little information is available on the profile of this workforce, which is necessary to understand the capacity of these nurses to provide quality and demanded care presently and in the future. METHODS: We utilize data from the American Community Survey to provide a contemporary …
Marriage, Children, and Sex-Based Differences in Physician Hours and Income
In this cross-sectional study of US physicians, marriage and children were associated with a greater earnings penalty for female physicians, primarily due to fewer hours worked relative to men. Addressing the barriers that lead to women working fewer hours could contribute to a reduction in the male-female earnings gap while helping to expand the effective physician workforce
Projecting the Future Registered Nurse Workforce After the Covid-19 Pandemic
In this study, the rebound in the total size of the US RN workforce during 2022 and 2023 indicates that the earlier drop in RN employment during the first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic was likely transitory. Updated forecasts of the future RN workforce are very close to those made before the pandemic
School District and Community Factors Associated with Test Score Declines During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Using data from approximately 7,800 school districts, we show that test score declines during the pandemic were large and highly variable. We find that test score declines were larger in lower-income and minority districts, but that within districts, White students and non–economically disadvantaged students lost about the same amount of ground as Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students. We find that the test score declines were …
What do changes in state Naep scores imply for birth cohorts’ later life outcomes
Since 1990, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been the primary benchmark for tracking the progress of state education reform. The focus on math and reading achievement is motivated by the cross‐sectional relationship between test scores and adult outcomes, such as earnings and college completion. But do changes in NAEP scores predict changes in long‐term economic and social outcomes for future earners—or do they reflect o…
Medicine (15 works) · Economics (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · School Choice and Performance (10 works) · Demography (9 works) · Mathematics education (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Academic achievement (6 works) · Demographic economics (6 works) · Political science (6 works)