ELIZABETH U. CASCIO Assistant Professor of Economics Dartmouth College

Mailing Address: Department of Economics Dartmouth College 6106 Rockefeller Hall Hanover, NH 03755 Tel: (603) 646-4096 Fax: (603) 646-2122 Email: Elizabeth dot Cascio at Dartmouth dot edu

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Curriculum Vitae (August 2009)	SCHOOLING AND SKILL OVER THE LIFE CYCLE:
Publications	Long Term Effects of Investments in Universal Early Education: Evidence from the American Kindergarten Expansion CEPR VoxEU.org column (August 20, 2009)
Working Papers Other Writing			Proponents of universal early education hope that such investments will yield long-term socioeconomic benefits. This column presents evidence that state governments funding public kindergartens in the US actually widened socioeconomic disparities across adults, as whites made gains that blacks did not. That result highlights the sensitivity of policy interventions to their means of funding and the structure of existing alternatives.
Home
	Race to the Top? Relative Age and Student Achievement CEPR VoxEU.org column (September 6, 2008)
		The decision to delay a child’s entrance into school is often motivated by concerns that he will be disadvantaged over the long term if not the biggest and brightest among his peers when he starts school. But is there any evidence to support a “race to the top”?
	How and Why Does Age at Kindergarten Entry Matter? Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter 2008-24 (August 8, 2008)
		There are remarkable differences in children's skills at the start of school. These skill differences are strongly tied to age, with students who enter kindergarten later in life doing better than younger entrants. Moreover, an achievement gap between older and younger school entrants has been found to persist until as late as the eighth or ninth grade. In this Economic Letter, I describe possible interpretations of this achievement gap, along with their implications, and discuss new empirical research attempting to establish their relative importance.
	Can Young Americans Compete in a Global Economy? Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter 2008-22 (July 18, 2008)
		U.S. high school students consistently perform worse on international standardized tests than students in other industrialized countries; on the other hand, the United States generally has maintained the highest college completion rate in the world. This Economic Letter summarizes new research by Cascio, Clark, and Gordon (2008) showing that, though U.S. 16- and 17-year-olds perform poorly relative to their counterparts in other nations, American 26- to 30-year-olds compare much more favorably to their counterparts abroad, suggesting that they are able to "catch up" in college or beyond.
	SCHOOL DESEGREGATION:
	From Brown to Busing: Desegregation in Southern Schools (with Nora Gordon, Ethan Lewis, and Sarah Reber) Insights on Southern Poverty 6(1), Summer 2008
		How did the South transition to desegregation after years of resistance? Viewing school desegregation as a choice—rather than an outcome strictly imposed upon a district by federal courts—it would not be surprising to find that southern districts followed very different paths to desegregation. We recently documented this heterogeneity using a new district-level data set spanning the two decades following Brown v Board of Education. This short article summarizes our findings. To date, the lack of representative, district-level data has made it impossible to investigate heterogeneity in the Southern desegregation experience.