62% of first time college students in public Texas institutions enroll in remedial classes. These classes are intended to prepare students to succeed in college level coursework, but delay getting into coursework that contributes to degree completion. In this project, I leverage a cutoff on college readiness exams in Texas in order to assess the impact of remedial coursework on persistence, degree attainment, and wages. Preliminary analysis suggests that students who must take remedial coursework are less likely to attend a 4-year institution or graduate with their Bachelor’s, but may not experience a wage penalty for these lower outcomes.
Southern cities grew their municipal boundaries six-fold between 1945-1990, while Northeastern cities, constrained by state-level differences in annexation powers, saw no expansion.
Using newly digitized data, we find the average expansion during this boom increased municipal population by 24\%. Through a difference-in-differences design, we evaluate how these boundary expansions impacted municipal finance. Results suggest reductions in per capita expenditures and municipal employment, though these savings did not extend to police and fire services, where initial reductions reversed as cities expanded coverage to annexed areas.