I am an economist specializing in the study of education and social policy relating to children, often in historical perspective. My research has frequently drawn inspiration from major policy and demographic shifts in 20th century America, including the spread of publicly funded early education, passage of landmark federal civil rights and education legislation, and rising immigration. My recent work has focused on childcare and early education and on understanding how policy design, economic conditions, and political voice affect educational attainment and economic mobility.
My research has received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation and has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics, among other outlets. In recent years, I have also occasionally authored policy pieces for The Hamilton Project.
In addition to my faculty appointment at Dartmouth College, I am a Research Associate in the Programs on Education, Development of the American Economy, and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Associate at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). I was also a co-editor at the Journal of Human Resources from June 2014 to October 2019 and currently serve on the editorial boards of ILR Review and the Journal of Historical Political Economy and as an elected member of the Executive Board of the Society of Labor Economists. I received my B.A. summa cum laude from Franklin and Marshall College in 1997 and my Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003. I joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2006.
Student Lecture, 23 March 2023
Child's Play? The Economics of Preschool Education in America
There is much interest today in public investments in high-quality preschool education. However, there is less consensus about the access and quality standards of the optimal preschool program. In this talk, Professor Cascio will discuss her approach to addressing this question, drawing on her work over the past decade.
Faculty Lecture, 24 March 2023
Legal Activism, State Policy, and Racial Inequality in Teacher Salaries and Educational Attainment in the Mid-Century American South
In the late 1930s, the NAACP launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. Using newly collected county panel data spanning three decades, this paper first documents heterogeneous within-state impacts of the campaign on teacher salaries. In states that reinforced successful NAACP litigation by introducing universal minimum salary schedules based on objective criteria, the relatively large wage penalty historically suffered by Black teachers in districts with higher Black enrollment shares disappeared by the mid-1950s. In states that resisted by adopting salary schedules using the National Teacher Examination as a measure of teaching efficacy, that penalty remained. In the second part of the paper, we estimate the effect of teacher pay on educational attainment exploiting variation in Black salary gains over time across counties with different Black enrollment shares, and across states by whether subsequent state policy reinforced or resisted court rulings favorable to the NAACP. We find that Black teacher salary gains contributed to the large reductions in racial inequality in school enrollment and grade progression in the South at mid-century.