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Access to community cultural institutions such as museums, zoos, and theaters has the potential to improve students' educational experiences. This article estimates the impact of School in the Park, a museum-based educational program for low-income students that takes place within the cultural institutions and museums of San Diego's Balboa Park. We identify the impact of participation in the program on short- and long-term academic and behavioral outcomes using longitudinal, student-level data since 1996; natural variation in the timing of program implementation at two elementary schools; and control groups of students from schools that did not receive the program. Findings indicate that participation in the program has positive short-term impacts, but program impacts were insignificant in the long run.

This paper begins by describing current housing affordability dynamics across Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Although rent burden metrics help identify households vulnerable to instability, it is the underlying housing and work conditions that shape residents’ lives and produce this indicator—particularly as people cope by working more and living in more crowded households. By comparing conditions driving the affordability crisis, we show that housing pressures found in the Inland Empire are a continuation or extension of Los Angeles dynamics. In response, we emphasize the need to simultaneously examine interrelated housing, labor, and social conditions and their underlying drivers across Southern California.

As student homelessness grows, little is known about how the timing and duration of homeless experiences shape K-12 outcomes. Using Los Angeles Unified School District administrative data, the authors examine whether these temporal dimensions of homelessness predict students' achievement and attendance. The authors find that homeless students scored lower on math tests and missed more school days than students who were never homeless. These associations are largest when students experience homelessness in the year the outcomes are measured. Experiencing homelessness in only 1 year and in 2 or more years both negatively predict outcomes, but associations are larger for students experiencing homelessness in only 1 year.

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Governments in some of the world’s richest nations appear to be caught in a double challenge of declining social budgets even as social needs are increasing. In this context, Outcomes Based Commissioning (OBC), has been suggested as one way in which ‘more’ social services can be provided for ‘less’ public resources. This form of commissioning is often linked with a new financing tool for social services, referred to in the US as ‘Pay for Success and Payment by Results in the UK or as a ‘Social Impact Bond’ (SIB). However, to date, this approach is under-theorised and this is a limiting factor both for shaping a research and evaluation agenda around SIBs and in understanding how such instruments might develop in future. Without a theoretical rationale for SIBs, it is not straightforward to assess whether, and how well, they have achieved their goals, and how they might be developed further. In this paper we consider two broad approaches to theorising SIBs. One draws on public administration theories, the other on innovation theories. To date, SIBs have often been theorised as the logical next step in the New Public Management (NPM). But NPM itself is a contested theory and recent theoretical innovations in public administration, particularly the concept of New Public Governance might provide a more useful theoretical framework. A second broad approach through which to understand SIBs is their potential to improve the rate and dissemination of innovation. There are many different innovation models that might be applied to better understanding of SIBs. We look first at the concept of Open Innovation with its focus on distributed innovation processes in which knowledge flows across organisational boundaries and more recent articulations – Open Innovation 2.0 – which place greater emphasis on mixed economy collabarations involving: industry; government; universities; and communities and users (the so-called ‘quadruple helix’) to solve societal challenges. We go on to consider social innovation, with its clearer focus on using social means to deliver social outcomes and whether SIBs can be theorised through this lens. No one model is entirely satisfactory as an explanatory framework for SIBs and we conclude by suggesting that a supporting theory combining NPG with elements of Open Innovation 2.0 and social innovation might be a productive approach for shaping future research and, in addition, might suggest some future directions for the next generation of SIBs.

This article provides new evidence on the housing-wealth effect on consumption using household panel data. A key advantage in studying the Chinese housing market is the absence of the collateral channel because households are prohibited from withdrawing housing equity. The results show that for every 1% increase in housing wealth, household consumption increases by 0.14%, suggesting an implied marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth of 0.023. Further, we find that this marginal propensity to consume is the largest among employees who face greater income uncertainty, suggesting that precautionary-saving motives are driving the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth sharing a school and neighborhoods often have similar academic achievement. This correlation between neighborhood quality and youth achievement holds even when controlling for many observable features of a family. Nevertheless, the correlation is not entirely causal because families and youth are sorted into relatively homogeneous groups. Thus, the quality of the school or neighborhood in part acts as a proxy for hard-to-measure attributes of the family.To enable separate estimation of sorting and school effects, we use the characteristics of the high school students will attend as an additional indicator of family background. When we compare youth who are at the same junior high school, the above measure is an appropriate instrument to identify family background separately from neighborhood and junior high school effects. Even after this correction, the point estimate of school effects on student achievement remains large and is statistically significant.

Teen out-of-wedlock mothers have lower education and earnings than peers who have children later. This study uses the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS) to examine the extent to which the apparent effects of out-of-wedlock teen fertility are due to pre- existing disadvantages of the young women and their families. We use a novel method that matches teen mothers to similar young women in their junior high school (that is, prior to pregnancy). We find that out-of-wedlock fertility reduces education substantially, although far less than the cross-sectional comparisons of means suggest. We further find that this effect is largest among those with the lowest probability of having a child out of wedlock.

Growing up in a family that lacks a biological father is correlated with a number of poor outcomes for youths. This study uses the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 to examine the extent to which differences in income or in parental involvement measurement error in income from single-parent homes affects the results in a large way because of the variability in income earned over a youth's teen years. Overall, we find that both lower income and lower parental involvement explain most of the disadvantages of youth in single-parent homes, but neither explains the disadvantages of families with stepfathers.

Growing up in a family that lacks a biological father is correlated with a number of poor outcomes for youths. This study uses the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS) to examine the extent to which the apparent effects of divorce or remarriage are not causal, but are due to pre-existing problems or advantages of the family or youth. We find that the correlations between family structure and youth outcomes are causal: neither divorce nor remarriage appear to be related to pre-existing characteristics of the youth or family. Finally, unlike some previous research, we do not find gender differences in the effects of the presence of a father or stepfather.

This study uses the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS) to replicate both the analysis in The Bell Curve and that of several of its previous replications. We examine the relative importance of test scores and family background in predicting dropping out of high school, starting college, arrests, and out-of-wedlock fertility. Our results relax several arbitrary assumptions made in The Bell Curve. We strongly reject The Bell Curve's conclusion that family backgrou nd is almost always less important than test scores in predicting outcomes. In addition, our analysis casts doubt on some of The Bell Curve's claims concerning reverse discrimination in education

Rental affordability represents a growing issue across the United States. Existing research largely focuses on consumption trade-offs related to rising rents or the impacts of poverty more generally. Much remains unknown about how rental affordability shapes household, family, and community-level dynamics, including differences in impacts and coping strategies across groups. We use data from focus groups with low-income immigrant and refugee households to reveal deep and far-reaching impacts. We show how residents rely upon unique neighborhood-based resources and social support. Citing significant competition for affordable units and their desire to stay in the neighborhood, residents express that they have limited alternatives to their current housing—even as many described harmful housing conditions and housing-related stress. Furthermore, rising housing costs have strained community and family dynamics, undermining social support. These findings illustrate unique and impactful housing affordability dynamics among diverse populations, which extend far beyond household and housing consumption, force impactful trade-offs, and introduce constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well recognized that immigrants have settled in communities all across the country and that demographic change has important implications for all segments of society. Further, a recent report [...]

A significant and growing English learner (EL) population attends public schools in the United States. Evidence suggests they are at a disadvantage when entering school and their achievement lags behind non-EL students. Some educators have promoted full-day kindergarten programs as especially helpful for EL students. We take advantage of the large EL population and variation in full-day kindergarten implementation in the Los Angeles Unified School District to examine the impact of full-day kindergarten on academic achievement, retention, and English language fluency using difference-in-differences models. We do not find significant effects of full-day kindergarten on most academic outcomes and English fluency through second grade. However, we find that EL students attending full-day kindergarten were 5 percentage points less likely to be retained before second grade and there are differential effects for several outcomes by student and school characteristics. (Contains 7 tables and 25 footnotes.)

Kindergarten policy varies widely both across and within states. Over the past decade, a number of states have instituted a full-day kindergarten requirement and others are considering it as a way to increase educational achievement. Many parents also support full-day kindergarten as a source of child care. This paper uses the Early Child Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 to evaluate the efficacy of this policy. In ordinary least squares, probit, county fixed effects, and instrumental variables models, we find that there are initial benefits for students and the mothers of students who attend full-day kindergarten, but that these differences largely evaporate by third grade. Contrary to claims by some advocates, attending full-day kindergarten is found to have no additional benefit for students in families with income below the poverty threshold.