Scholars@Duke
Jason Baron

Jason Baron

Assistant Professor of Economics
Economics
jason.baron@duke.edu
Box 90097, Durham, NC 27708-0097
213 Social Sciences Building, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works

Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime

Journal article Review of Economics and Statistics · May 1, 2026 This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the United States. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children’s lives on the likelihood that they are arre ... Full text Cite

Unwarranted racial disparity in U.S. foster care placement

Journal article Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · March 1, 2026 Black children in the U.S. are twice as likely as white children to spend time in foster care. Such racial disparities raise concerns of discrimination, but might also reflect differences in the underlying need for intervention. This paper estimates unwarr ... Full text Cite

Discrimination in Multi-Phase Systems: Evidence from Child Protection.

Journal article The quarterly journal of economics · August 2024 We develop empirical tools for studying discrimination in multi-phase systems, and apply them to the setting of foster care placement by child protective services. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of two sets of decision-makers-initial hotline call s ... Full text Cite

Racial Discrimination in Child Protection

Journal article · July 2023 Cite

The Push for Racial Equity in Child Welfare: Can Blind Removals Reduce Disproportionality?

Journal article Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · March 1, 2023 We conduct the first quantitative analysis of “blind removals,” an increasingly popular reform that seeks to reduce the over-representation of Black children in foster care by eliminating biases in the removal decisions of investigators. We first show that ... Full text Cite

Pretrial juvenile detention

Journal article Journal of Public Economics · January 1, 2023 Roughly one in four juveniles arrested in the U.S. spend time in a detention center prior to their court date. To study the consequences of this practice for youth, we link the universe of individual public school records in Michigan to juvenile and adult ... Full text Cite

Temporary Stays and Persistent Gains: The Causal Effects of Foster Care

Journal article American Economic Journal Applied Economics · April 1, 2022 Six percent of children in the United States enter foster care by age 18. We estimate the effects of foster care on children's outcomes by exploiting the quasi-random assignment of child welfare investigators in Michigan. We find that foster care improved ... Full text Cite

School Spending and Student Outcomes: Evidence from Revenue Limit Elections in Wisconsin†

Journal article American Economic Journal Economic Policy · February 1, 2022 This study examines the impacts of two distinct types of school spending on student outcomes. State-imposed revenue limits cap the total amount of revenue that a school district in Wisconsin can raise unless the district holds a referendum asking voters to ... Full text Cite

Union Reform, Performance Pay, and New Teacher Supply: Evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10

Conference AEA Papers and Proceedings · May 1, 2021 This study examines the impact of performance pay on teacher selection. I exploit a shift toward performance pay in Wisconsin induced by the enactment of Act 10, which gave school districts autonomy to redesign their compensation schemes. Followin ... Full text Cite