Researchers often assess causal effects of educational programs or policies using educational assessment data. This dissertation explores novel methods of estimating causal effects in educational assessment data and is broken into three parts. The first part proposes a regression discontinuity design with an ordinal running variable to assess the…

Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community…

Recent research reveals consistent lags in American students' science achievement scores. Not only are the scores lower in the United States compared to other developed nations, but even within the United States, too many students are well below science proficiency scores for their grade levels. The current research addresses this problem by…