Jesse Rothstein is a public and labor economist. His research focuses on education and tax policy, and particularly on the way that public institutions ameliorate or reinforce the effects of children’s families on their academic and economic outcomes. Within education, he has conducted studies on teacher evaluation; on the value of school infrastructure spending; on affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions; and on the causes and consequences of racial segregation. He has also written about the effects of unemployment insurance on job search and labor force participation; the role of structural factors in impeding recovery from the Great Recession; and the incidence of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Rothstein's work has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Chicago Law Review, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, among other outlets. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MPP from the Goldman School, and he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2009-2010 he served as a Senior Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers and then as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.
Contact and Office Hours
Office – GSPP 2607 Hearst, Room 313
Office – Economics 631B Evans
Office – IRLE 2521 Channing Way
Office Hours
About
Areas of Expertise
- Tax Policy
- Economic Policy
- Education
- Labor and Employment
- Program Evaluation
- Public Finance
- Quantitative Methods
- Research Methods
- Race & Policy
- Higher Education
- Children, Youth and Families
Research
Research Affiliations
- California Policy Lab: Faculty Director
- National Bureau of Economic Research: Research Associate
Working Papers
The Lost Generation? Scarring after the Great Recession
Working Paper (May 2019)
I investigate medium- and long-term impacts of the Great Recession on post-recession college graduates. Most so-called “scarring” models emphasize effects of initial conditions that attenuate over the first decade of a worker’s career. But early career recessions may also have permanent effects. I decompose the recent cohorts’ experience into transitory time effects, medium-term scarring, and permanent cohort effects. Cohort effects are strongly cyclical. Medium-term scarring explains only half of this cyclicality. The long-run cumulative effect of the recession on graduates’ employment is more than twice as large as the immediate effect.
Inequality of Educational Opportunity? Schools as Mediators of the Intergenerational Transmission of Income
Working Paper (January 2019)
Intergenerational income transmission varies across commuting zones (CZs). I investigate whether children’s educational outcomes help to explain this variation. Differences among CZs in the relationship between parental income and children’s human capital explain only one-ninth of the variation in income transmission. A similar share is explained by differences in the return to human capital. One-third reflects earnings differences not mediated by human capital, and 40% reflects differences in marriage patterns. Intergenerational mobility appears to reflect job networks and the structure of local labor and marriage markets more than it does the education system.
The Augmented Synthetic Control Method
Working Paper (November 2018)
The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The “synthetic control” is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit’s pre-treatment outcomes as closely as possible. The curse of dimensionality, however, means that SCM does not generally achieve exact balance, which can bias the SCM estimate. We propose an extension, Augmented SCM, which uses an outcome model to estimate the bias due to covariate imbalance and then de-biases the original SCM estimate, analogous to bias correction for inexact matching. We motivate this approach by showing that SCM is a (regularized) inverse propensity score weighting estimator, with pre-treatment outcomes as covariates and a ridge penalty on the propensity score coefficients. We give theoretical guarantees for specific cases and propose a new inference procedure. We demonstrate gains from Augmented SCM with extensive simulation studies and apply this framework to canonical SCM examples. We implement the proposed method in the new augsynth R package.
Selected Publications
Can Nudges Increase Take-up of the EITC?: Evidence from Multiple Field Experiments
Linos E., Prohofsky, A., Ramesh, A., Rothstein, J., Unrath, M. 2021. Can Nudges Increase Take-up of the EITC? Evidence from Multiple Field Experiments. Forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Policy.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) distributes more than $60 billion to over 20 million low-income families annually. Nevertheless, an estimated one-fifth of eligible households do not claim it. We ran six pre-registered, large-scale field experiments to test whether “nudges” could increase EITC take-up (N=1million). Despite varying the content, design, messenger, and mode of our messages, we find no evidence that they affected households’ likelihood of filing a tax return or claiming the credit. We conclude that even the most behaviorally informed low-touch outreach efforts cannot overcome the barriers faced by low-income households who do not file returns.
Universal Basic Income in the US and Advanced Countries
Hoynes, Hilary and Jesse Rothstein. 2019. “Universal Basic Income in the United States and Advanced Countries,” Annual Review of Economics, Volume 11, pp. 929–58.
We discuss the potential role of Universal Basic Incomes (UBIs) in advanced countries. A feature of advanced economies that distinguishes them from developing countries is the existence of well developed, if often incomplete, safety nets. We develop a framework for describing transfer programs, flexible enough to encompass most existing programs as well as UBIs, and use this framework to compare various UBIs to the existing constellation of programs in the United States. A UBI would direct much larger shares of transfers to childless, non-elderly, non-disabled households than existing programs, and much more to middle-income rather than poor households. A UBI large enough to increase transfers to low-income families would be enormously expensive. We review the labor supply literature for evidence on the likely impacts of a UBI. We argue that the ongoing UBI pilot studies will do little to resolve the major outstanding questions.
Increasing Take-up of Cal Grants
Linos E., Reddy V., and Rothstein J. 2018. Increasing Take-up of Cal Grants. In Designing Financial Aid for California’s Future. The Institute for College Access and Success (TICAS) Research Report. November.
School Finance Reform and the Distribution of Student Achievement
with Julien Lafortune and Diane Schanzenbach
2018. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 10(2), April.
We study the impact of post-1990 school finance reforms, during the so-called "adequacy" era, on absolute and relative spending and achievement in low-income school districts. Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of reform timing, we show that reforms lead to sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in spending in low-income school districts. Using representative samples from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we find that reforms cause increases in the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the reform. The implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.
Making Work Pay Better Through an Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit
Hilary Hoynes, Jesse Rothstein and Krista Ruffini, "Making Work Pay Better Through an Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit" in Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Ryan Nunn, eds, The 51% Driving Growth through Women's Economic Participation, The Hamilton Project.
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a refundable tax credit that promotes work. Research has shown that it also reduces poverty and improves health and education outcomes. The maximum credit for families with two or fewer children has remained flat in inflation-adjusted terms since 1996. Over the same period, earnings prospects have stagnated or diminished for many Americans, and prime-age employment rates have fallen. This paper proposes to build on the successes of the EITC with a ten percent acrossthe-board increase in the federal credit. This expansion would provide a meaningful offset to stagnating real wages, encourage more people to enter employment, lift approximately 600,000 individuals out of poverty, and improve health and education outcomes for millions of children.
In the News
Articles and Op-Eds
Advice for the Next President: Expand Social Security
Bloomberg, November 3, 2016
Taking on Teacher Tenure Backfires
The New York Times, June 12, 2014
Media Citations
States challenge federal rule expanding overtime pay
Marketplace, September 21, 2016
The Part Of Cleveland's Economic Story That Trump Doesn't Tell
The Huffington Post, July 19, 2016
A master teacher went to court to challenge her low evaluation. What her win means for her profession.
The Washington Post, May 10, 2016
How Do You Fix Schools? Maybe Just Give Them More Money.
Slate, February 23, 2016
Grading Teachers by the Test
The New York Times, March 24, 2015
Webcasts
Berkeley Conversations - COVID-19: Economic Impact, Human Solutions
Henry E Brady, Ellora Derenoncourt, Hilary Hoynes, Jesse Rothstein, Gabriel Zucman,
Date: April 10, 2020 Duration: 60 minutes
The California Policy Lab with Jesse Rothstein and Evan White
Jesse Rothstein, Evan White, Henry E. Brady,
Date: June 5, 2017 Duration: 25 minutes
Evaluating Teacher Evaluation - What are Value-Added Metrics?
Dr. Jesse Rothstein,
Date: May 30, 2012 Duration: 83 minutes
2012 Wildavsky Forum for Public Policy: Economic Possibilities for Our Children
Larry Summers,
Event: 2012 Wildavsky Forum - Lawrence H. Summers
Date: April 12, 2012 Duration: 76 minutes
Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Challenge for Policy Makers
Jesse Rothstein, Edward H. Haertel, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Linda Darling-Hammond, Bethany Little,
Event: AERA Hill Briefing
Date: September 14, 2011 Duration: 116 minutes
Last updated on 08/30/2022