Browsing by Author "Hill, Andrew J."

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The effect of school closings on teacher labor market outcomes and teacher effectiveness
(MIT Press - Journals, 2020-05) Hill, Andrew J.; Jones, Daniel B.
School closings displace thousands of teachers in the U.S. every year. This paper explores how elementary school teachers in North Carolina respond to this labor market shock. After documenting that declining enrollment is a key driver of school closings in our study, we find that while most displaced teachers move to new schools in the same district, a considerable share leave public education altogether. We find that the increase in the propensity to leave teaching is largest for experienced teachers. It is also marginally larger for the highest and lowest value-added teachers compared to teachers in the middle of the value-added distribution, and, strikingly, twice as large for black teachers than white teachers even from the same closing school. Moving schools after a school closing has no impact on teacher effectiveness as measured by value-added. Although the primary goal of school closings is typically to move students out of declining or failing schools, school closings also affect the overall distributions of important teacher characteristics such as experience, race, and effectiveness in raising test scores.
The Effect of Teammate Personality on Team Production
(Elsevier, 2022-10) Hancock, Stacey A.; Hill, Andrew J.
Many goods and services are produced in teams. We explore how teammate personality traits impact productivity on joint team tasks. Studying student teams at a large university and considering the “Big Five” personality characteristics of extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, we find that teammate conscientiousness has a small, positive impact on team performance: a one standard deviation increase in teammate conscientiousness increases performance on a team task by about three percent of a standard deviation in our preferred specification. The effect is evident holding teammate ability and gender fixed, and suggestively operates through improved team functioning and sustained increases in student effort. We also find evidence of positive spillovers from teammate openness and negative spillovers from teammate extroversion.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in the Classroom
(University of Chicago Press, 2021-09) Hill, Andrew J.; Jones, Daniel B.
Do teachers’ expectations directly impact student achievement? We draw on administrative data from North Carolina schools that report both student test scores and teachers’ expectations of students’ performance on these tests. Employing student fixed effects and instrumental variables strategies to overcome endogeneity concerns, we find that higher exogenously determined teacher expectations increase test scores for fourth to eighth graders. Impacts are suggestively larger for students in earlier grades and in self-contained classes with the same math and reading teacher.
The spillover effects of parental verbal conflict on classmates' cognitive and noncognitive outcomes
(Wiley, 2022-11) Zhou, Weina; Hill, Andrew J.
This study shows that children exposed to Interparental Verbal Conflict (IPVC) exert negative spillovers on their peers. Our first identification strategy uses within-school, across-classroom variation in peer's IPVC in schools that randomly assign students into classrooms. Our second strategy uses within-student, year-to-year changes in peer's IPVC to control for peer's pre-existing characteristics. Both results suggest that being randomly assigned to classes where more classmates experience IPVC reduces mental wellbeing, lowers social engagement, diminishes self-confidence, and increases the likelihood of problem behaviors. Effects operate by damaging relationships between classmates. There is no evidence of impacts on test scores or teacher behavior.