As the largest immigration policy in 25 years, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) made deportation relief and work authorization available to 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants. This ...paper looks at how DACA affects DACA-eligible immigrants' labor market outcomes. I use a difference-in-differences design for unauthorized immigrants near the criteria cutoffs for DACA eligibility. I find DACA increases the likelihood of working by increasing labor force participation and decreasing the unemployment rate for DACA-eligible immigrants. I also find DACA increases the income of unauthorized immigrants in the bottom of the income distribution. I find little evidence that DACA affects the likelihood of attending school. Using these estimates, DACA moved 50,000 to 75,000 unauthorized immigrants into employment. If the effects of Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) are similar to DACA, then DAPA could potentially move over 250,000 unauthorized immigrants into employment.
•Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) benefits labor market outcomes.•DACA moves immigrants into employment from outside the labor force and unemployment.•DACA increases the income for immigrants in the bottom of the income distribution.•DACA moved 50,000 to 75,000 unauthorized immigrants into employment.
Test score measures of teacher quality may not fully capture teachers’ impact on students. We use test score and non–test score measures of student achievement and behavior to estimate multiple ...dimensions of teacher quality. We find that these two measures of teacher quality are only weakly correlated and that both affect students’ high school performance. A teacher removal simulation that uses both measures improves most long-term student outcomes by over 50%, compared to a policy that uses test scores alone. Our results also show that for high school outcomes the effects of teachers in later grades are larger than those in earlier grades and that performance in core elementary school subjects matters more than that in other subjects.
Increasing the efficiency of the school system is a primary focus of policymakers. I analyze how the time of day affects students' productivity and if efficiency gains can be obtained by rearranging ...the order of tasks they perform throughout the school day. Using a panel data set of nearly 2 million sixth-through eleventh-grade students in Los Angeles County, I perform within-teacher, class type, and student estimation of the time-of-day effect on students' learning as measured by GPA and state test scores. I find that given a school start time, students learn more in the morning than later in the school day. Having a morning instead of afternoon math or English class increases a student's GPA by 0.072 (0.006) and 0.032 (0.006), respectively. A morning math class increases state test scores by an amount equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap. Rearranging school schedules can lead to increased academic performance.
The remarkable capacity for pluripotency and self-renewal in embryonic stem cells (ESCs) requires a finely tuned transcriptional circuitry wherein the pathways and genes that initiate differentiation ...are suppressed, but poised to respond rapidly to developmental signals. To elucidate transcriptional control in mouse ESCs in the naive, ground state, we defined the distribution of engaged RNA polymerase II (Pol II) at high resolution. We find that promoter-proximal pausing of Pol II is most enriched at genes regulating cell cycle and signal transduction and not, as expected, at developmental or bivalent genes. Accordingly, ablation of the primary pause-inducing factor NELF does not increase expression of lineage markers, but instead causes proliferation defects, embryonic lethality, and dysregulation of ESC signaling pathways. Indeed, ESCs lacking NELF have dramatically attenuated FGF/ERK activity, rendering them resistant to differentiation. This work thus uncovers a key role for NELF-mediated pausing in establishing the responsiveness of stem cells to developmental cues.
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•Pausing of Pol II does not repress expression of bivalent or developmental genes•Disruption of pausing attenuates proliferative and developmental signaling pathways•ESCs lacking NELF are refractory to FGF signaling and lineage commitment•Regulated Pol II pausing tunes the differentiation potential of stem cells
Williams et al. investigate pausing of Pol II in embryonic stem cells and find that pausing is enriched at genes regulating cell cycle and signal transduction rather than developmental genes. Notably, disruption of pausing strongly attenuates FGF/ERK signaling, rendering stem cells refractory to signaling through this cascade and cell differentiation.
In the United States, over 400,000 individuals are in jail daily waiting for their criminal cases to be resolved. The majority of detainees are held because they cannot post bail. We estimate the ...impact of being detained pretrial on the likelihood of being convicted and sentence length using data on nearly a million criminal cases in New York City. Causal effects are identified using variation across arraignment judges in their propensities to detain defendants. We find that being detained increases the probability of conviction by 13 percentage points for felony defendants. Although pretrial detention lowers the probability of rearrest while cases are being adjudicated, this reduction in criminal activity is mostly offset by an increase in recidivism within 2 years after disposition. Higher pretrial detention rates among minority defendants explain 40 percent of the black-white gap in rates of being sentenced to prison and 28 percent of the Hispanic-white gap.
In August 2010, the Los Angeles Times publicly released value-added ratings for teachers and elementary schools in Los Angeles. Exploiting the release of these ratings as a natural experiment and ...using the timing of their release to account for regression to the mean, I find that low-rated teachers saw increases in their students' math and English test scores. High-rated teachers saw little to no change in their students' tests with the release of the ratings. These differential responses from low- and high-rated teachers suggest possible test score gains from the release of teacher ratings. School ratings had no additional impact on student test scores. I find no evidence that the release of the ratings affected classroom composition or teacher turnover.
•Natural experiment looking at how the release of the LA Times ratings affected teachers•Low-rated teachers saw increases in their students' math and English test scores.•No evidence that the ratings affected classroom composition or teacher turnover.•Individual ratings affected teachers but the school ratings had no additional impact.
For nearly a century developmental biologists have recognized that cells from embryos can differ in their potential to differentiate into distinct cell types. Recently, it has been recognized that ...embryonic stem cells derived from both mice and humans exhibit two stable yet epigenetically distinct states of pluripotency: naive and primed. We now show that nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT) and the metabolic state regulate pluripotency in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Specifically, in naive hESCs, NNMT and its enzymatic product 1-methylnicotinamide are highly upregulated, and NNMT is required for low S-adenosyl methionine (SAM) levels and the H3K27me3 repressive state. NNMT consumes SAM in naive cells, making it unavailable for histone methylation that represses Wnt and activates the HIF pathway in primed hESCs. These data support the hypothesis that the metabolome regulates the epigenetic landscape of the earliest steps in human development.
We evaluate two low-cost college support programs designed to target poor time management, a common challenge among many undergraduates. We experimentally evaluate the programs across three distinct ...colleges, randomly assigning more than 9,000 students to construct a weekly schedule in an online planning module and to receive weekly study reminders or coach consultation via text message. Despite high participation and engagement, and treated students at two sites marginally increasing study time, we estimate precise null effects on student credit accumulation, course grades, and retention at each site for the full sample and for multiple subgroups. The results and other supplemental evidence suggest that low-touch programs that offer scheduling assistance, encouragement, and reminders for studying lack the required scope to significantly affect academic outcomes.
Characterizing the transcriptome of individual cells is fundamental to understanding complex biological systems. We describe a droplet-based system that enables 3' mRNA counting of tens of thousands ...of single cells per sample. Cell encapsulation, of up to 8 samples at a time, takes place in ∼6 min, with ∼50% cell capture efficiency. To demonstrate the system's technical performance, we collected transcriptome data from ∼250k single cells across 29 samples. We validated the sensitivity of the system and its ability to detect rare populations using cell lines and synthetic RNAs. We profiled 68k peripheral blood mononuclear cells to demonstrate the system's ability to characterize large immune populations. Finally, we used sequence variation in the transcriptome data to determine host and donor chimerism at single-cell resolution from bone marrow mononuclear cells isolated from transplant patients.
Abstract
Managing student behaviour is integral to the education production process. We study the trade-offs of school suspension policies by modelling and estimating how changes in school suspension ...policies causally impact student performance and teacher turnover. Our results indicate that the reduction in suspension rates in the Los Angeles Unified School District decreased math and English test scores, decreased grade point averages and increased absences. Teacher turnover also increased, particularly for inexperienced teachers. We also document an efficiency-equity trade-off: while achievement decreased for most students in the district, the highest-risk students experienced moderate gains in achievement.
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