NBER Publications by Rucker Johnson

This paper investigates the extent and ways in which childhood school quality factors causally influence subsequent adult socioeconomic and health outcomes. The study analyzes the life trajectories of children born between 1950 and 1970, and followed through 2007, using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID data are linked with multiple data sources that describe the neighborhood attributes and school quality resources that prevailed at the time these children were growing up. I estimate the long-run impacts of court-ordered school desegregation plans on adult attainments by exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of initial court orders, which generated differences in the timing and scope of the implementation of these plans during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Differe...