Helen F. Ladd

About

Helen F. Ladd is the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor Emerita of Public Policy and Professor Emerita of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University. Her contact information includes her email hladd@duke.edu and her office located at 117 Sanford Building, Durham, NC 27708. Her professional role emphasizes her distinguished status within the field of public policy, contributing to academic and policy discussions through her research and teaching.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Economic growth
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Management
• Marketing

Selected publications

• The Hidden Costs of Teacher Turnover

  AERA Open · 2020 · 258 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  High teacher turnover imposes numerous burdens on the schools and districts from which teachers depart. Some of these burdens are explicit and take the form of recruiting, hiring, and training costs. Others are more hidden and take the form of changes to the composition and quality of the teaching staff. This study focuses on the latter. We ask how schools respond to spells of high teacher turnover and assess organizational and human capital effects. Our analysis uses two decades of administrati…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding Heterogeneity in the Impact of Public Preschool Programs

  Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development · 2023-06-01 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access

  We examine the North Carolina Pre-K (NC Pre-K) program to test the hypothesis that observed variation in effects resulting from exposure to the program can be attributed to interactions with other environmental factors that occur before, during, or after the pre-k year. We examine student outcomes in 5th grade and test interaction effects between NC's level of investment in public pre-k and moderating factors. Our main sample includes the population of children born in North Carolina between 198…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Teacher Assistants Improve Student Outcomes? Evidence From School Funding Cutbacks in North Carolina

  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis · 2021-02-16 · 30 citations

  articleOpen access

  This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period of recession-induced cutbacks in teacher assistants. Using panel data from North Carolina, we exploit the state’s unique system of financing its local public schools to identify the causal effects of teacher assistants, controlling for other staff, on measures of student achievement. We find consistent evidence of positive effects of teacher assistants, an unde…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Long-term effects of early childhood programs through eighth grade: Do the effects fade out or grow?

  Children and Youth Services Review · 2020 · 30 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

  Urban Affairs Review · 2021-12-06 · 16 citations

  article

  The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions t…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Charles T. Clotfelter

  Duke University

  140 shared

• Jacob L. Vigdor

  University of Washington

  107 shared

• Edward B. Fiske

  27 shared

• Steven W. Hemelt

  W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

  26 shared

• John Ýinger

  20 shared

• Susanna Loeb

  19 shared

• Howard S. Bloom

  Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation

  16 shared

• Harry Brighouse

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  15 shared

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Jennifer Lansfordh-92
• Garry S. Mitchellh-45
• Lisa A. Gennetianh-41