Tyler Ludwig

Using the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS) and the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), this paper estimates the effect of immigrants’ English proficiency on the educational performance of their children as well as measures of parental involvement in school. Together, the data allow us to examine children ranging from preschool to high school age. Given the confounding factors associated with English knowledge, we employ an instrumental variables two-stage least squares strategy that exploits parents’ age at arrival and whether their country of origin is English speaking. For the younger cohort, which we access through the NIS sample, our results suggest that children of immigrant parents with higher English language ability score higher on reading assessments as well as some math-related assessments. For the older students, which we assess through the CILS sample, we see a positive effect on reading scores as a result of parental English proficiency. When examining parental involvement, we find that English proficiency results in a higher likelihood of being part of a parent-teacher organization as well as a higher probability of parent-teacher interaction. Our results are robust to various specifications and alternative instrumental variables.

I explore the consequences that large asset-liability gaps in municipal public worker pensions have on cities and their residents. Through increased pension payments, asset-liability gaps impose protracted expenditure shocks on cities. To analyze how cities react to this pension pressure, I assembled a novel data set which captures the universe of cities and their pensions in California from 2003 to 2016. Using the changes in city contributions to their pensions resulting from pension investment shocks - which are plausibly exogenous to cities’ year-to-year spending needs - my estimates indicate that in response to growing unfunded pension liabilities, cities significantly cut per capita spending on culture and health and reduced their emergency services employment. Cities do not decrease total expenditures (inclusive of pension payments) or increase total revenue; instead, they reallocate budgets and reduce their public workforce to make up for rising retirement spending. This implies that taxpayers are getting worse public services for their dollar, with pensions crowding out spending in cities.

Elected district attorneys (DAs) have wide discretion to raise or lower criminal prosecution rates, yet the extent to which DAs’ politics shape their decision-making remains unclear. In this paper, we evaluate the causal impact of DA partisan affiliation on prosecution rates, sentencing outcomes, and recidivism. Using quasi-random variation in DA partisanship stemming from close elections, we find that the marginal Democratic DA is 36 percent less likely to prosecute criminal cases than her Republican counterpart and imposes 13 percent shorter incarceration sentences. However, defendants in jurisdictions with Democratic DAs are more 5 percent more likely to re-appear in the court system. We find similar patterns using an alternative matching specification, suggesting our results capture the average effect of prosecutor partisanship. Our findings underscore the extent to which the punitiveness of the court system depends on the partisanship of local district attorneys.