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Checking Out Public Libraries: The Impact of Library Use on Reading and Other Activities (Job Market Paper, 2007) Can policy makers encourage individuals to participate in beneficial activities, like recreational reading, by simply providing free and easy access to the requisite resources? If so, how do individuals reallocate time between various activities to accommodate this increased participation? This paper examines these questions as they pertain to the free reading materials provided by public libraries. Traditional estimates are biased in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity that affects the library use decision as well as reading time, so I use an instrumental variables approach where the instrument is a household's distance to their closest public library. Using data from the Current Population Survey merged with the American Time Use Survey, I find that library use in the past month increases the amount of time an individual spends on reading by roughly 35 minutes per day. This increase is more than offset by a 45 minute decrease in time spent watching television, and there is no statistically significant effect on other leisure and non-leisure activities. An analysis of education outcomes using the National Household Education Survey indicates that library use has a positive impact on some academic outcomes of children, although these results are not robust. Rough calculations suggest that the monetary value of reading that is induced by increasing access to library books is equivalent to a $222 increase in yearly wages, compared to a $200 per worker cost of doing so.
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The Impacts of Gifted & Talented Education (2006) Abstract: This paper estimates the impact of gifted and talented program participation on academic achievement and peer influence for a sample of 8th grade students. Gifted and talented education provides children that have been identified as having high ability in some intellectual or creative respect with a supplemental curriculum to their traditional school course work. Participation in a gifted program is not random, therefore I use an instrumental variables approach to overcome the bias associated with ordinary least squares estimates. The instrument is constructed from the interaction of three variables and reflects each child's standing or rank in terms of getting into his/her school's gifted program. This rank is determined by the criteria used by the school to admit students into the gifted program, and whether or not the child and child's classmates fulfills the criteria. The IV estimates find an increase in math standardized test scores by 0.87 standard deviations as a result of participation, but the effect dwindles down over time. There is little conclusive evidence to support the claim that gifted education increases interest and participation in academics. Moreover, there is no indication that participation influences the composition of a child's peer group.
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