Research

The Unintended Cost of Distance Learning: An Analysis of Child Maltreatment (with Jeongsoo Suh) - In Submission

Education personnel play a crucial role in identifying and reporting child maltreatment. However, school closures amid COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this vital reporting system. We causally investigate how remote learning influenced trends in child maltreatment allegations and the severity of these cases, leveraging county- and state-level variations in remote learning instructional weeks in the United States during the 2020-21 school year. Utilizing report-level data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), we find that in counties and states with higher exposure to remote instruction, fewer allegations were reported, but a higher proportion of allegations were substantiated, and maltreatment-related child fatalities increased. The reduction in allegations was primarily driven by those reported by education personnel, and the impacts varied significantly based on characteristics such as the child's race/ethnicity and the type of maltreatment. These results highlight an unintended cost of distance learning: remote instruction impaired the detection of child maltreatment, particularly among underrepresented groups, leading to fewer reports but more severe cases that could have lasting impacts on children. They also urge prompt policy interventions to safeguard children who remain undetected and to prevent the consequences of remote learning from exacerbating existing inequalities in child welfare.

Gender Differences in Remote Learning amid COVID-19: Disruptive Peers and Self-Control (draft available upon request)

A shift to remote and blended learning following pandemic-induced school closures changed the nature of the learning environment for students, leading to changes in the relative importance of educational inputs and their impacts on student outcomes. In this paper, I explore another dimension of achievement growth differences during the pandemic, student gender. Using administrative and parental survey data obtained from a metro-Atlanta school district, I exploit the variation in exposure to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and decompose achievement gaps between boys and girls to examine how changes in exposure to historically disruptive peers and gender-based differences in self-control impacted student learning trajectories. I focus on two interesting mechanisms that could potentially explain the widened achievement gap between girls and boys: change in the proportion of historically disruptive peers in classrooms & student's self-control level, proxied by proclivity to rush on exams.

Closing the Coverage Gap: The Impact of the ACA Medicaid Expansion on Low-Income Young Adults' Health Insurance (draft available upon request)

 [Georgia Policy Labs - Metro Atlanta Policy Lab for Education (MAPLE)]

The Effect of Universal Gaming Shutdown Policy in South Korea

Navigating Post-Pandemic Educational Disparities: K-12 Public School Disenrollment, Chronic Absenteeism, and School Choice