Dissertation Defense: “Policy and Personnel Decisions in Public Schools: Essays in the Economics of Education”, Jack Keefer, University of California, Santa Barbara
Speaker
Jack Keefer, PhD Candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara
Biography
Jack Keefer is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also received a
Master’s in Economics. Prior to joining UC Santa Barbara, Jack received a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Economics from
Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. His research focuses on education and public policy, with past work examining school
nutrition programs and identifying unclaimed meal funding in the Community Eligibility Provision. Jack has served as
Head Teaching Assistant at UC Santa Barbara, an Adjunct Lecturer at Cal Poly, and an Adjunct Professor at Westmont
College.
Title
“Policy and Personnel Decisions in Public Schools: Essays in the Economics of Education
Abstract
This dissertation examines how school administrators make policy and personnel decisions in public schools. Across three chapters, I study the role of complexity, prior experience, and professional relationships in shaping policy adoption and teacher hiring decisions.
The first chapter studies the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), a federal school nutrition program that allows high- poverty schools to serve free meals to all students. Districts can group schools to increase benefits, but identifying the optimal grouping becomes increasingly difficult as the number of schools grows. I develop a mathematical programming approach that identifies optimal groupings in settings where exhaustive search methods are infeasible and use it to estimate the financial impact of suboptimal CEP applications. I find that districts could gain up to half a billion dollars annually or serve more than 275 million additional free meals at no loss of net revenue, through better grouping decisions. These unclaimed benefits are concentrated in larger districts with more complex grouping problems.
The second chapter examines whether administrators’ prior policy experience affects subsequent policy adoption. I study this question using the Community Eligibility Pro-vision, whose adoption is discretionary and administratively complex. Using more than 6.5 million Texas education staffing records from 2014 to 2025 matched to district and school-level CEP participation data, I construct administrator employment histories and identify districts employing administrators previously exposed to CEP in another district.
Estimating a discrete-time hazard model of first-time district CEP adoption, I find that districts employing a previously exposed administrator have a 44 percent higher annual hazard of adopting the CEP. The relationship is strongest when prior exposure is more direct, when exposed administrators hold higher-authority roles, and when CEP decisions are more complex or consequential. Timing tests, a placebo analysis using District of Innovation adoption, and alternative exposure specifications support a causal interpretation of the results. These findings suggest that administrator mobility can transmit policy-specific knowledge across districts and affect whether beneficial but administratively complex policies are adopted.
The third chapter studies whether teacher applicants are more likely to be hired when they have a prior coworker relationship with one of the hiring school’s administrators. I combine more than 700,000 teacher application records from six large Texas school systems with statewide administrative employment records that follow public education employees across schools, districts, and roles from 2004–05 through 2024–25. These records allow me to observe the full applicant pool for each vacancy, identify who was hired, and reconstruct prior coworker relationships between applicants and hiring administrators. I find that applicants who previously worked with a hiring administrator outside the applied-to school are 4.9 percentage points more likely to be hired, relative to an overall hiring rate of 3.0 percent. The relationship is larger for ties to principals than for ties to vice principals, and larger for relationships that lasted longer and ended more recently. Falsification tests provide little support for alternative explanations, including shared career histories and sorting across schools. The size of the hiring advantage suggests that prior professional relationships are a significant part of the teacher hiring process, affecting which teachers are hired and, therefore, which students they teach.
Event Details
Join us for Jack’s dissertation defense, where he will present his research titled “Policy and Personnel Decisions in Public Schools: Essays in the Economics of Education”. We invite you to attend this important academic milestone and learn more about his work in the field. To access a copy of the dissertation here, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.
