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We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first-choice school. Using rich administrative data on peers, teachers, course offerings, and other inputs, we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality. Gains in attainment are concentrated among girls. Girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college-preparatory course taking, while boys do not. (JEL D44, H75, I21, I23, J16)

We examine how employers learn about worker productivity in a randomized pilot experiment which provided objective estimates of teacher performance to school principals. We test several hypotheses that support a simple Bayesian learning model with imperfect information. First, the correlation between performance estimates and prior beliefs rises with more precise objective estimates and more precise subjective priors. Second, new information exerts greater influence on posterior beliefs when it is more precise and when priors are less precise. Employer learning affects job separation and productivity in schools, increasing turnover for teachers with low performance estimates and producing small test score improvements. (JEL D83, I21, J24, J45)

The health outcomes of infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) may be jeopardized when required nursing care is missed. This correlational study of missed care in a U.S. NICU sample adds national scope and an important explanatory variable, patient acuity. Using 2016 NICU registered nurse survey responses ( N = 5,861) from the National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators, we found that 36% of nurses missed one or more care activities on the past shift. Missed care prevalence varied widely across units. Nurses with higher workloads, higher acuity assignments, or in poor work environments were more likely to miss care. The most common activities missed involved patient comfort and counseling and parent education. Workloads have increased and work environments have deteriorated compared with 8 years ago. Nurses' assignments should account for patient acuity. NICU nurse staffing and work environments warrant attention to reduce missed care and promote optimal infant and family outcomes.

AbstractCan a school or district improve student achievement simply by switching to a higher‐quality textbook or curriculum? We conducted the first multi‐textbook, multi‐state effort to estimate textbook efficacy following widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated changes in the textbook market. Pooling textbook adoption and student test score data across six geographically and demographically diverse U.S. states, we found little evidence of differences in average achievement gains for schools using different math textbooks. We found some evidence of greater variation in achievement gains among schools using pre‐CCSS editions, which may have been more varied in their content than post‐CCSS editions because they were written for a broader set of standards. We also found greater variation among schools that had more exposure to a given text. However, these differences were small. Despite considerable interest and attention to textbooks as a low‐cost, "silver bullet" intervention for improving student outcomes, we conclude that the adoption of a new textbook or set of curriculum materials, on its own, is unlikely to achieve this goal.