Jonathan Guryan

Northwestern University | NU · School of Education and Social Policy

This study explores whether a school-based group counseling program for adolescent girls, implemented at scale, can mitigate trauma-related mental health harms. In a randomized trial involving 3749 Chicago public high school girls, we find that participating in the program for 4 months induces a 22% reduction in posttraumatic stress disorder sympto...

Improving academic outcomes for economically disadvantaged students has proven challenging, particularly for children at older ages. We present two large-scale randomized controlled trials of a high-dosage tutoring program delivered to secondary school students in Chicago. One innovation is to use paraprofessional tutors to hold down cost, thereby...

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family. Using administrative data on children from both Florida and Denmark, the paper examines the effects of having a disabled younger sibling. To address the identification challenge, the paper compares the differential effects for first- and second-born children in three-plus-child...

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family. Using administrative data on children from both Florida and Denmark, the paper examines the effects of having a disabled younger sibling. To address the identification challenge, the paper compares the differential effects for first-and second-born children in three-plus-child...

Importance Survivors of preterm birth often present with medical morbidities; however, variation in their long-term educational performance has not been well described. Objective To estimate the association between gestational age and 4 outcomes in school-aged children: readiness to enter kindergarten, scores on standardized tests in elementary an...

The authors conducted a cluster-randomized trial to examine the effectiveness of structured teacher adaptations to the implementation of an evidence-based summer literacy program that provided students with (a) books matched to their reading level and interests and (b) teacher scaffolding for summer reading in the form of end-of-year comprehension...

We present the results of three large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCTs) carried out in Chicago, testing interventions to reduce crime and dropout by changing the decision-making of economically disadvantaged youth. We study a program called Becoming a Man (BAM), developed by the non-profit Youth Guidance, in two RCTs implemented in 2009–10...

It is notoriously difficult to identify peer effects within the family, because of the common shocks and reflection problems. We make use of a novel identification strategy and unique data in order to gain some purchase on this problem. We employ data from the universe of children born in Florida between 1994 and 2002 and in Denmark between 1990 an...

Policymakers and economists have expressed support for the use of incentives in educational settings. In this paper, rather than asking whether incentives work, we focus on a different question: For whom and under what conditions do incentives work? This question is particularly important because incentives’ promise relies on the idea that they mig...

(Abstracted from JAMA Pediatr 2016;170(8):758–764) Although there is considerable evidence to suggest that full-term infants (born at 39 or 40 weeks’ gestation) have better health and cognitive outcomes in childhood and into adulthood than early-term infants (born at 37 or 38 weeks’ gestation), data supporting these facts are missing. If such infor...

Importance Late-term gestation (defined as the 41st week of pregnancy) is associated with increased risk of perinatal health complications. It is not known to what extent late-term gestation is associated with long-term cognitive and physical outcomes. Information about long-term outcomes may influence physician and patient decisions regarding opti...

To improve the reading comprehension outcomes of children in high poverty schools, policymakers need to identify reading interventions that show promise of effectiveness at scale. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a low-cost and large-scale summer reading intervention that provided comprehension lessons at the end of the school year and sti...

This paper presents the results of a laboratory experiment designed to investigate whether the option of a Prize Linked Savings (PLS) product alters the likelihood that subjects choose to delay payment. By comparing PLS and standard savings products in a controlled way, we find strong evidence that a PLS payment option leads to greater rates of pay...

There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a randomize...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960's and early 1970's that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and racial convergence in measures of health and hospital acc...

We briefly review the evolution of empirical work on discrimination. We discuss why traditional regression‐based approaches neither convincingly measure market discrimination nor disentangle the relative importance of animus versus statistical discrimination in explaining such discrimination as exists. We describe the development of modern correspo...

We make use of a new data resource, merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002, to study the effects of birth weight on cognitive development from kindergarten through schooling. Using twin fixed effects models, we find that the effects of birth weight on cognitive development are essentially constant through...

We discuss research on discrimination against blacks and other racial minorities in labor market outcomes, highlighting fundamental challenges faced by empirical work in this area. Specifically, for work devoted to measuring whether and how much discrimination exists, we discuss how the absence of relevant data, the potential noncomparability of bl...

Research on the causes of delinquency has a long research history, often with an undue focus on how cognitive ability serves as the main predictor of delinquent activity. The current review examines interventions that focus on psychological factors other than cognitive ability, and discusses how several of these programs have demonstrated efficacy...

For over three centuries and throughout the globe, people have enthusiastically bought savings products that incorporate lottery elements. In lieu of paying traditional interest to all investors proportional to their balances, these Prize Linked Savings (PLS) accounts distribute periodic sizeable payments to some investors using a lottery-like draw...

For over three centuries and throughout the globe, people have enthusiastically bought savings products that incorporate lottery elements. In lieu of paying traditional interest to all investors proportional to their balances, these Prize Linked Savings (PLS) accounts distribute periodic sizeable payments to some investors using a lottery-like draw...

We present an empirical test for the addictiveness of lottery gambling that exploits an exogenous shock to local market consumption of lottery gambling. It uses the sale of a winning jackpot ticket in a zip code as an instrument for present consumption and tests for a causal relationship between present and future consumption. This test estimates t...

The effects of a voluntary summer reading intervention with and without a parent training component were evaluated with a sample of low-income Latino children from language minority families. During the last month of 4th grade, 370 children were pretested on a measure of reading comprehension and vocabulary and were randomly assigned to (a) a treat...

This paper uses random assignment in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that playing partners' ability affects performance, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, and soft-fruit pickers. In our preferred specification we ca...

Though most who study inequality have come to understand that a nuanced and multifaceted story is needed to explain the experiences of the past 30 years, many economists take from the volumes of research on the subject that some combination of skill-biased technological change and changing institutions (e.g., erosion of the real value of the minimu...

There is a growing consensus that emissions of greenhouse gases due to human activity will alter the earth’s climate, most notably by causing temperatures, precipitation levels, and weather variability to increase. The design of optimal climate change mitigation policies requires estimates of the health and other benefits of reductions in greenhous...

We present an empirical test for the addictiveness of lottery gambling. To distinguish state dependence from serial correlation, we exploit an exogenous shock to local market consumption of lottery gambling. We use the sale of a winning ticket in the zip code, the location of which is random conditional on sales, as an instrument for present consum...

Economists typically account for differences in economic outcomes between ethnic groups with explanations having to do with differences in skill, explanations emphasizing informational problems associated with accurately assessing skill, as in statistical discrimination models, or explanations that rely on the presence of prejudice, the key element...

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the U.S. military between 1976 and 1991 -- to show: 1) t...

“Time-use statistics offer a unique tool for exploring a wide range of policy concerns including social change; division of labour; allocation of time for household work; the estimation of the value of household production; transportation; leisure and recreation; pension plans; and health-care programmes, among others” (United Nations). This expert...

Peer interactions among children have long interested social scientists. Identifying causal peer effects is difficult, and a number of studies have used random assignment to produce evidence that peers affect each other's outcomes. This focus by sociologists and economists on whether peers affect each other has not been matched by direct evidence o...

We test the predictions from Becker's (1957) seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages (a) vary negatively with the prejudice of the "marginal" white in a state, (b) vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a s...

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpot size and is larger in areas with more economically disadvantaged populations. Sales patterns...

This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one’s children. Using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight some interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children: we find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with...

A large literature documents the significant gap in average test scores between blacks and whites, while a related literature finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980’s, and a stagnation in convergence during the 1990’s. We use two data sources the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the U.S. mili...

This paper tests the predictions about the relationship between racial prejudice and racial wage gaps from Becker's (1957) seminal work on employer discrimination - something which has not previously been done in the large economics discrimination literature. Using rich data on racial prejudice from the General Social Survey, we find strong support...

This paper uses the random assignment of playing partners in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that the ability of playing partners affects the performance of professional golfers, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, an...

In an effort to alleviate the perceived growth of a digital divide, the U.S. government enacted a major subsidy for Internet and communications investment in schools starting in 1998. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of the subsidy-known as the E-Rate-on Internet investment in California public schools. The program subsidized spending by 20%-9...

There is a large body of literature in both psychology and economics documenting mistaken perceptions of randomness. In this paper we demonstrate that people appear to believe that "lightning will strike twice" when it comes to lottery jackpots. First, we show that in the week following the sale of a winning ticket, retailers that sell a winning ja...

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were "inherently unequal." This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years benefited black and white students in desegregated school districts. Data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses suggest desegregation plans of the 1970's reduce...

In this paper we examine detailed sales data from the Texas Lottery Commission to investigate whether consumers respond to the sale of a winning lottery ticket. The data indicate that retailers that sell a winning jackpot ticket experience relative increases in game-specific ticket sales of between 10 and 30 percent in the following effect, with th...

The education reform movement includes efforts to raise teacher quality through stricter certification and licensing provisions. Most US states now require public school teachers to pass a standardized test such as the Praxis. Although any barrier to entry is likely to raise wages in the affected occupation, the theoretical effects of such requirem...

The paper studies a typical state-level education finance equalization scheme, and considers two questions. First, what fraction of state education aid is spent on schools? And second, does increased educational funding for historically low-spending districts lead to improved student achievement? Estimates based on variation in spending caused by s...

Improving the effectiveness of public schools remains one of the most important public policy goals in the U.S. There is great debate, however, whether the marginal dollar spent in U.S. public schools is productive. This paper examines the effectiveness of public school spending in the context of a recent effort to equalize funding across school di...