Geoffrey T Wodtke
Biographic Data
| ID | 155494 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Geoffrey T Wodtke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Geoffrey T |
| FAMILY NAME | Wodtke |
| SIGNATURE | WODTKE G T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6424-6040 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 569 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Poor Neighborhoods, Bad Schools? A High-Dimensional Model of Place-Based Disparities in Academic Achievement
Persistent disparities in academic achievement between students from high- and low- poverty neighborhoods are widely attributed to differences in school quality. Using nationally representative data from more than 18,000 students and nearly 1,000 elementary schools, we examine how the schools serving students from different neighborhoods vary across more than 160 characteristics, including detailed measures of their composition, resources, instru…
Deep Learning With DAGs
Social science theories often postulate systems of causal relationships among variables, which are commonly represented using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). As non-parametric causal models, DAGs require no assumptions about the functional form of the hypothesized relationships. Nevertheless, to simplify empirical evaluation, researchers typically invoke such assumptions anyway, even though they are often arbitrary and do not reflect any theoreti…
Racial Disparities in Childhood Exposure to Neurotoxic Air Pollution
Racial disparities in exposure to pollution exacerbate health and developmental inequalities. This study examines racial differences in cumulative exposure to a comprehensive set of neurotoxic air pollutants during early childhood, when individuals are especially vulnerable to their harms, and it investigates whether these disparities are attributable to or intersect with socioeconomic status (SES). Integrating the Early Childhood Longitudinal St…
The distribution of privately held business assets in the United States
Although privately held businesses are central to the economy and society, little is known about how their assets are distributed among the population. To better understand rising and persistent wealth inequalities, this paper describes the household distribution of private business assets in the United States and examines how it has changed over time. Using data from the 1989–2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that the relative number of …
Environmental inequality and disparities in school readiness: The role of neurotoxic lead
Developmental science has increasingly scrutinized how environmental hazards influence child outcomes, but few studies examine how contaminants affect disparities in early skill formation. Linking research on environmental inequality and early childhood development, this study assessed whether differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead explain sociodemographic gaps in school readiness. Using panel data tracking a representative sample of 1266 Chi…
The Effects of Head Start on Low-Income Mothers
Head Start is a federal antipoverty program that provides free childcare, preschool, and related services to disadvantaged families. Research on Head Start has focused almost exclusively on impacts among children. Using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a nationally representative field experiment, the authors estimate treatment effects on maternal employment, economic hardship, and depression. The authors find that Head Start admission gene…
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
Toxic Neighborhoods: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty and Environmental Lead Contamination on Early Childhood Development
Although socioeconomic disparities in cognitive ability emerge early in the life course, most research on the consequences of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood has focused on school-age children or adolescents. In this study, we outline and test a theoretical model of neighborhood effects on cognitive development during early childhood that highlights the mediating role of exposure to neurotoxic lead. To evaluate this model, we follow 1,266 …
Residual Balancing: A Method of Constructing Weights for Marginal Structural Models
When making causal inferences, post-treatment confounders complicate analyses of time-varying treatment effects. Conditioning on these variables naively to estimate marginal effects may inappropriately block causal pathways and may induce spurious associations between treatment and the outcome, leading to bias. To avoid such bias, researchers often use marginal structural models (MSMs) with inverse probability weighting (IPW). However, IPW requir…
Regression-based Adjustment for Time-varying Confounders
Social scientists are often interested in estimating the marginal effects of a time-varying treatment on an end-of-study continuous outcome. With observational data, estimating these effects is complicated by the presence of time-varying confounders affected by prior treatments, which may lead to bias in conventional regression and matching estimators. In this situation, inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighted (IPTW) estimation of a marginal st…
Income Stratification among Occupational Classes in the United States
Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratifica…
A Regression-with-Residuals Method for Estimating Controlled Direct Effects
Political scientists are increasingly interested in causal mediation, and to this end, recent studies focus on estimating a quantity called the controlled direct effect (CDE). The CDE measures the strength of the causal relationship between a treatment and outcome when a mediator is fixed at a given value. To estimate the CDE, Joffe and Greene (2009) and Vansteelandt (2009) developed the method of sequential g-estimation, which was introduced to …
The Effects of Education on Beliefs about Racial Inequality
It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspectiv…
Social Relations, Technical Divisions, and Class Stratification in the United States: An Empirical Test of the Death and Decomposition of Class Hypotheses
Recent critiques of class analysis variously argue that aggregate class differences in life conditions and political attitudes have either declined to the point of irrelevance or decomposed into differences based on highly disaggregate occupations. This study empirically evaluates these arguments as they relate specifically to aggregate classes defined in terms of workplace ownership and authority relations, which are conceived to be distinct fro…
Neighborhoods, Schools, and Academic Achievement: A Formal Mediation Analysis of Contextual Effects on Reading and Mathematics Abilities
Although evidence indicates that neighborhoods affect educational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the mechanisms thought to mediate these effects. This study investigates whether school poverty mediates the effect of neighborhood context on academic achievement. Specifically, it uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, counterfactual methods, and a value-added modeling strategy to estimate the total, natur…
Estimating Moderated Causal Effects with Time-varying Treatments and Time-varying Moderators: Structural Nested Mean Models and Regression with Residuals
Individuals differ in how they respond to a particular treatment or exposure, and social scientists are often interested in understanding how treatment effects are moderated by observed characteristics of individuals. Effect moderation occurs when individual covariates dampen or amplify the effect of some exposure. This article focuses on estimating moderated causal effects in longitudinal settings in which both the treatment and effect moderator…
Are Smart People Less Racist? Verbal Ability, Anti-Black Prejudice, and the Principle-Policy Paradox
It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality. According to this perspective, ideological refinement occurs in response to shifting patterns of racial conflict an…
Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010
This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each o…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
Continuity and change in the American class structure: Workplace ownership and authority relations from 1972 to 2010
Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood
Theory suggests that the impact of neighborhood poverty depends on both the duration and timing of exposure. Previous research, however, has not properly analyzed the sequence of neighborhoods to which children are exposed throughout the early life course. This study investigates the effects of different longitudinal patterns of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on the risk of adolescent parenthood. It follows a cohort of children in the PS…
The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis
How does education affect racial attitudes? Past studies focus almost exclusively on whites’ attitudes toward blacks, neglecting important minority populations. This study extends previous research by analyzing the effects of education on beliefs about racial stereotypes, discrimination, and affirmative action policies among whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks. Results indicate that whites, Hispanics, and blacks with higher levels of education …
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
College Residence and Academic Performance: Who Benefits From Living on Campus
Although previous research suggests that living on campus promotes a variety of desirable academic outcomes by enhancing students’ involvement and engagement with their institutions, research on academic performance frequently ignores the possibility that different groups of students are differentially affected by their living environments. Furthermore, previous studies tend to rely on students from a few large public research universities rather…
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood
Theory suggests that the impact of neighborhood poverty depends on both the duration and timing of exposure. Previous research, however, has not properly analyzed the sequence of neighborhoods to which children are exposed throughout the early life course. This study investigates the effects of different longitudinal patterns of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on the risk of adolescent parenthood. It follows a cohort of children in the PS…
The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis
How does education affect racial attitudes? Past studies focus almost exclusively on whites’ attitudes toward blacks, neglecting important minority populations. This study extends previous research by analyzing the effects of education on beliefs about racial stereotypes, discrimination, and affirmative action policies among whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks. Results indicate that whites, Hispanics, and blacks with higher levels of education …
Neighborhoods, Schools, and Academic Achievement: A Formal Mediation Analysis of Contextual Effects on Reading and Mathematics Abilities
Although evidence indicates that neighborhoods affect educational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the mechanisms thought to mediate these effects. This study investigates whether school poverty mediates the effect of neighborhood context on academic achievement. Specifically, it uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, counterfactual methods, and a value-added modeling strategy to estimate the total, natur…
Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010
This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each o…
A Regression-with-Residuals Method for Estimating Controlled Direct Effects
Political scientists are increasingly interested in causal mediation, and to this end, recent studies focus on estimating a quantity called the controlled direct effect (CDE). The CDE measures the strength of the causal relationship between a treatment and outcome when a mediator is fixed at a given value. To estimate the CDE, Joffe and Greene (2009) and Vansteelandt (2009) developed the method of sequential g-estimation, which was introduced to …
Estimating Moderated Causal Effects with Time-varying Treatments and Time-varying Moderators: Structural Nested Mean Models and Regression with Residuals
Individuals differ in how they respond to a particular treatment or exposure, and social scientists are often interested in understanding how treatment effects are moderated by observed characteristics of individuals. Effect moderation occurs when individual covariates dampen or amplify the effect of some exposure. This article focuses on estimating moderated causal effects in longitudinal settings in which both the treatment and effect moderator…
Are Smart People Less Racist? Verbal Ability, Anti-Black Prejudice, and the Principle-Policy Paradox
It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality. According to this perspective, ideological refinement occurs in response to shifting patterns of racial conflict an…
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
Regression-based Adjustment for Time-varying Confounders
Social scientists are often interested in estimating the marginal effects of a time-varying treatment on an end-of-study continuous outcome. With observational data, estimating these effects is complicated by the presence of time-varying confounders affected by prior treatments, which may lead to bias in conventional regression and matching estimators. In this situation, inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighted (IPTW) estimation of a marginal st…
Residual Balancing: A Method of Constructing Weights for Marginal Structural Models
When making causal inferences, post-treatment confounders complicate analyses of time-varying treatment effects. Conditioning on these variables naively to estimate marginal effects may inappropriately block causal pathways and may induce spurious associations between treatment and the outcome, leading to bias. To avoid such bias, researchers often use marginal structural models (MSMs) with inverse probability weighting (IPW). However, IPW requir…
Toxic Neighborhoods: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty and Environmental Lead Contamination on Early Childhood Development
Although socioeconomic disparities in cognitive ability emerge early in the life course, most research on the consequences of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood has focused on school-age children or adolescents. In this study, we outline and test a theoretical model of neighborhood effects on cognitive development during early childhood that highlights the mediating role of exposure to neurotoxic lead. To evaluate this model, we follow 1,266 …
The Effects of Education on Beliefs about Racial Inequality
It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspectiv…
College Residence and Academic Performance: Who Benefits From Living on Campus
Although previous research suggests that living on campus promotes a variety of desirable academic outcomes by enhancing students’ involvement and engagement with their institutions, research on academic performance frequently ignores the possibility that different groups of students are differentially affected by their living environments. Furthermore, previous studies tend to rely on students from a few large public research universities rather…
Continuity and change in the American class structure: Workplace ownership and authority relations from 1972 to 2010
The distribution of privately held business assets in the United States
Although privately held businesses are central to the economy and society, little is known about how their assets are distributed among the population. To better understand rising and persistent wealth inequalities, this paper describes the household distribution of private business assets in the United States and examines how it has changed over time. Using data from the 1989–2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that the relative number of …
College Residence and Academic Performance: Who Benefits From Living on Campus
Although previous research suggests that living on campus promotes a variety of desirable academic outcomes by enhancing students’ involvement and engagement with their institutions, research on academic performance frequently ignores the possibility that different groups of students are differentially affected by their living environments. Furthermore, previous studies tend to rely on students from a few large public research universities rather…
Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduati…
The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis
How does education affect racial attitudes? Past studies focus almost exclusively on whites’ attitudes toward blacks, neglecting important minority populations. This study extends previous research by analyzing the effects of education on beliefs about racial stereotypes, discrimination, and affirmative action policies among whites, Asians, Hispanics, and blacks. Results indicate that whites, Hispanics, and blacks with higher levels of education …
Duration and Timing of Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and the Risk of Adolescent Parenthood
Theory suggests that the impact of neighborhood poverty depends on both the duration and timing of exposure. Previous research, however, has not properly analyzed the sequence of neighborhoods to which children are exposed throughout the early life course. This study investigates the effects of different longitudinal patterns of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on the risk of adolescent parenthood. It follows a cohort of children in the PS…
Continuity and change in the American class structure: Workplace ownership and authority relations from 1972 to 2010
Are Smart People Less Racist? Verbal Ability, Anti-Black Prejudice, and the Principle-Policy Paradox
It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality. According to this perspective, ideological refinement occurs in response to shifting patterns of racial conflict an…
Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010
This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each o…
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in th…
Social Relations, Technical Divisions, and Class Stratification in the United States: An Empirical Test of the Death and Decomposition of Class Hypotheses
Recent critiques of class analysis variously argue that aggregate class differences in life conditions and political attitudes have either declined to the point of irrelevance or decomposed into differences based on highly disaggregate occupations. This study empirically evaluates these arguments as they relate specifically to aggregate classes defined in terms of workplace ownership and authority relations, which are conceived to be distinct fro…
Neighborhoods, Schools, and Academic Achievement: A Formal Mediation Analysis of Contextual Effects on Reading and Mathematics Abilities
Although evidence indicates that neighborhoods affect educational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the mechanisms thought to mediate these effects. This study investigates whether school poverty mediates the effect of neighborhood context on academic achievement. Specifically, it uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, counterfactual methods, and a value-added modeling strategy to estimate the total, natur…
Estimating Moderated Causal Effects with Time-varying Treatments and Time-varying Moderators: Structural Nested Mean Models and Regression with Residuals
Individuals differ in how they respond to a particular treatment or exposure, and social scientists are often interested in understanding how treatment effects are moderated by observed characteristics of individuals. Effect moderation occurs when individual covariates dampen or amplify the effect of some exposure. This article focuses on estimating moderated causal effects in longitudinal settings in which both the treatment and effect moderator…
The Effects of Education on Beliefs about Racial Inequality
It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspectiv…
Income Stratification among Occupational Classes in the United States
Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratifica…
A Regression-with-Residuals Method for Estimating Controlled Direct Effects
Political scientists are increasingly interested in causal mediation, and to this end, recent studies focus on estimating a quantity called the controlled direct effect (CDE). The CDE measures the strength of the causal relationship between a treatment and outcome when a mediator is fixed at a given value. To estimate the CDE, Joffe and Greene (2009) and Vansteelandt (2009) developed the method of sequential g-estimation, which was introduced to …
Residual Balancing: A Method of Constructing Weights for Marginal Structural Models
When making causal inferences, post-treatment confounders complicate analyses of time-varying treatment effects. Conditioning on these variables naively to estimate marginal effects may inappropriately block causal pathways and may induce spurious associations between treatment and the outcome, leading to bias. To avoid such bias, researchers often use marginal structural models (MSMs) with inverse probability weighting (IPW). However, IPW requir…
Regression-based Adjustment for Time-varying Confounders
Social scientists are often interested in estimating the marginal effects of a time-varying treatment on an end-of-study continuous outcome. With observational data, estimating these effects is complicated by the presence of time-varying confounders affected by prior treatments, which may lead to bias in conventional regression and matching estimators. In this situation, inverse-probability-of-treatment-weighted (IPTW) estimation of a marginal st…
Toxic Neighborhoods: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty and Environmental Lead Contamination on Early Childhood Development
Although socioeconomic disparities in cognitive ability emerge early in the life course, most research on the consequences of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood has focused on school-age children or adolescents. In this study, we outline and test a theoretical model of neighborhood effects on cognitive development during early childhood that highlights the mediating role of exposure to neurotoxic lead. To evaluate this model, we follow 1,266 …
Environmental inequality and disparities in school readiness: The role of neurotoxic lead
Developmental science has increasingly scrutinized how environmental hazards influence child outcomes, but few studies examine how contaminants affect disparities in early skill formation. Linking research on environmental inequality and early childhood development, this study assessed whether differences in exposure to neurotoxic lead explain sociodemographic gaps in school readiness. Using panel data tracking a representative sample of 1266 Chi…
The Effects of Head Start on Low-Income Mothers
Head Start is a federal antipoverty program that provides free childcare, preschool, and related services to disadvantaged families. Research on Head Start has focused almost exclusively on impacts among children. Using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a nationally representative field experiment, the authors estimate treatment effects on maternal employment, economic hardship, and depression. The authors find that Head Start admission gene…
Are Neighborhood Effects Explained by Differences in School Quality
It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into compo…
The distribution of privately held business assets in the United States
Although privately held businesses are central to the economy and society, little is known about how their assets are distributed among the population. To better understand rising and persistent wealth inequalities, this paper describes the household distribution of private business assets in the United States and examines how it has changed over time. Using data from the 1989–2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, we show that the relative number of …
Deep Learning With DAGs
Social science theories often postulate systems of causal relationships among variables, which are commonly represented using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). As non-parametric causal models, DAGs require no assumptions about the functional form of the hypothesized relationships. Nevertheless, to simplify empirical evaluation, researchers typically invoke such assumptions anyway, even though they are often arbitrary and do not reflect any theoreti…
Racial Disparities in Childhood Exposure to Neurotoxic Air Pollution
Racial disparities in exposure to pollution exacerbate health and developmental inequalities. This study examines racial differences in cumulative exposure to a comprehensive set of neurotoxic air pollutants during early childhood, when individuals are especially vulnerable to their harms, and it investigates whether these disparities are attributable to or intersect with socioeconomic status (SES). Integrating the Early Childhood Longitudinal St…
Poor Neighborhoods, Bad Schools? A High-Dimensional Model of Place-Based Disparities in Academic Achievement
Persistent disparities in academic achievement between students from high- and low- poverty neighborhoods are widely attributed to differences in school quality. Using nationally representative data from more than 18,000 students and nearly 1,000 elementary schools, we examine how the schools serving students from different neighborhoods vary across more than 160 characteristics, including detailed measures of their composition, resources, instru…
Economics (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Developmental psychology (9 works) · Mathematics (9 works) · Demographic economics (8 works) · Disadvantaged (8 works) · Medicine (8 works) · Political science (8 works)