Summer 2021 Research Assistant with Michael Dinerstein

This internship is part of the University’s Jeff Metcalf Internship Program. Please review the Metcalf Interns’ Responsibility Notice to learn more about program requirements for Metcalf interns.

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Michael Dinerstein

The research project investigates the mechanisms that explain why the growth of the urban charter education sector has occurred mostly through school networks (chains). Possible mechanisms include chains being more productive (lower cost), chains being higher quality, chains benefitting from branding, chains benefitting from regulations, and chains growing to exert market power. I am focusing on the charter sector in New York City, where chains have captured large market shares and changes to state law suddenly relaxed the rules on whether schools can belong to a single corporation or must be separate. For the project, I am currently collecting data from financial statements to get measures of schools' costs. By the end of spring, the data should be ready for analysis. The research assistant (RA) would help with any remaining data cleaning, with preparing the data for analysis, and with running event study regressions where the event is the schools merging into single corporations. If the project progresses quickly, the RA may also help with starting to code a model in Matlab of school demand and supply. The RA would also provide a literature review of the economics of education charter school literature and the IO literature on firm boundaries and expansion of chains.

Stata programming (though R is fine, provided a willingness to learn Stata). Matlab or Python would be nice but not essential. Preferably has taken at least 1 econometrics course.