About

Damon Clark is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. His main research interest is in the economics of education. Other research interests include labor economics and public economics. Before joining UCI, Clark was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. He completed his PhD at Oxford University and spent two years at the Center for Labor Economics at UC Berkeley. He is also a Research Associate at the NBER, a Research Fellow at IZA, and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Business
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Labour economics
• Economic growth
• Market economy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• An efficiency case for equity-based school priorities

  Journal of Public Economics · 2025-09-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many school districts operate “school choice" or “open enrollment" programs that give parents a choice of school. The popular schools in these districts are often oversubscribed, so districts must decide which applicants receive priority at these schools. Typically, districts give priority to students who live close to these schools or allocate by random lottery. However, to provide more equitable access to popular schools and to reduce school segregation, some districts prioritize students based on socio-economic status (e.g., favoring students from less-affluent neighborhoods). This paper shows that, despite their effects on transportation costs, these equity-based priorities can increase efficiency in the sense of raising aggregate welfare. They do this by facilitating better matches of students to schools. • Many school districts operate “school choice” or “open enrollment” programs that give parents a choice of school. • The popular schools in these districts are often oversubscribed, so districts must decide which students receive priority at them. • We show that prioritizing students based on socio-economic status (e.g., favoring students from less-affluent neighborhoods) can be efficient.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploiting discontinuities in secondary school attendance to evaluate value added

  2023-07-19 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  We use a new empirical strategy to test various measures of school effectiveness in England. Our approach exploits discontinuities in attendance probabilities that occur at unpredictable distance cutoffs used as tiebreakers in admissions processes for oversubscribed schools. We show that raw, unadjusted test score outcomes of schools are biased estimators of school effectiveness due to sorting of certain types of students into certain types of schools. Controlling for basic background characteristics (but not prior attainment) does not change this result. On the other hand, we cannot reject the hypothesis that simple value added models which adjust school test scores for difference in the prior attainment of their intake produce unbiased effectiveness estimates. This includes "Progress 8", the measure of value added that has been used in England since 2016, suggesting the measure accurately captures the true effect of schools on pupils' GCSE attainment. Adding additional background controls does not invalidate the estimates, but it does not improve precision either. Finally, we combine our unbiased estimator of effectiveness with data on secondary school applications to show that parents often do not put the most effective school in their local area down as their first choice school. This is particularly true for parents from poorer households, suggesting SES gaps in access to good schools could be narrowed through changes to school application patterns.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• School quality and the return to schooling in Britain: New evidence from a large-scale compulsory schooling reform

  Journal of Public Economics · 2023 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Demographic economics

  What is the causal effect of schooling on subsequent labor market outcomes? In this paper I contribute evidence on this question by re-examining a British compulsory schooling reform that yields large-scale and quasi-experimental variation in schooling. First, I note that this reform was introduced in 1947, when British students attended higher-track (for the “top” 20%) or lower-track (for the rest) secondary schools. The reform increased the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15 and I show that the vast majority (over 95%) of affected students attended lower-track schools. Second, I show that the additional schooling induced by the reform had close to zero impact on a range of labor market outcomes. Third, I attribute these findings to the quality of these lower-track schools, which I argue was low along several dimensions.

  PublisherDOI

• Unveiling school effectiveness: Progress 8, parental choices and closing the achievement gap

  2023-09-21 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  We show that Progress 8 is a reliable measure of school effectiveness and that parents often do not apply to their most effective local school.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploiting discontinuities in secondary school attendance to evaluate value added

  2023-07-19 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access

  We use a new empirical strategy to test various measures of school effectiveness in England. Our approach exploits discontinuities in attendance probabilities that occur at unpredictable distance cutoffs used as tiebreakers in admissions processes for oversubscribed schools. We show that raw, unadjusted test score outcomes of schools are biased estimators of school effectiveness due to sorting of certain types of students into certain types of schools. Controlling for basic background characteristics (but not prior attainment) does not change this result. On the other hand, we cannot reject the hypothesis that simple value added models which adjust school test scores for difference in the prior attainment of their intake produce unbiased effectiveness estimates. This includes "Progress 8", the measure of value added that has been used in England since 2016, suggesting the measure accurately captures the true effect of schools on pupils' GCSE attainment. Adding additional background controls does not invalidate the estimates, but it does not improve precision either. Finally, we combine our unbiased estimator of effectiveness with data on secondary school applications to show that parents often do not put the most effective school in their local area down as their first choice school. This is particularly true for parents from poorer households, suggesting SES gaps in access to good schools could be narrowed through changes to school application patterns.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Quality of Lower-Track Education: Evidence from Britain

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Diné Entrepreneurship: Indigenous Contemporary Entrepreneurship

  2019-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This qualitative study researches the concept of entrepreneurship in an indigenous population by assessing the external and internal challenges entrepreneurs face, discusses the various types of support offered, and compiles recommendations for partners to understand the Diné entrepreneur. This research interviewed nine enrolled members of the Navajo Nation tribe who have either created businesses on the reservations, managed non-profits aimed at supporting entrepreneurs, or possessed a wealth of entrepreneurial experiences working both on or off the Navajo Nation Reservation. This text builds upon the themes of economic development, cultural-match, and indigenous sovereignty by analyzing the concept, action, and future of Diné entrepreneurship.

  PublisherDOI

• Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2019-08-21 · 92 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Will college students who set goals work harder and perform better? We report two field experiments that involved four thousand college students. One experiment asked treated students to set goals for performance in the course; the other asked treated students to set goals for a particular task (completing online practice exams). Task-based goals had robust positive effects on the level of task completion and marginally significant positive effects on course performance. Performance-based goals had positive but small and statistically insignificant effects on course performance. A theoretical framework that builds on present bias and loss aversion helps to interpret our results.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Peer Preferences, School Competition, and the Effects of Public School Choice

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2019-11-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper develops a new economic model of public school choice. The key innovation is to model competition between schools in an environment in which parents have peer preferences. The analysis yields three main findings. First, peer preferences dampen schools’ incentives to exert effort in response to competitive pressure. Second, when peer preferences are sufficiently strong, choice can reduce social welfare. This is because choice is costly to exercise but aggregate peer quality is fixed. Third, given strong peer preferences, choice can reduce school quality in more affluent neighborhoods. We conclude that peer preferences weaken the case for choice. (JEL H73, H75, I21, I28, R23)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication data for: The Long-Run Effects of Attending an Elite School: Evidence from the United Kingdom

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2016-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long-run outcomes including completed education, income, and fertility. Our data consist of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK district that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using instrumental variables methods that exploit the school assignment formula, we find that elite school attendance had large impacts on completed education. Surprisingly, there are no significant effects on most labor market outcomes except for an increase in female income. By contrast, we document a large and significant negative impact on female fertility. (JEL I21, I24, I26, J13, J16, J24, J31)

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth Cascio

  29 shared

• Nora Gordon

  Georgetown University

  24 shared

• Stephen Coate

  Cornell University

  13 shared

• Levon Barseghyan

  Cornell University

  12 shared

• Emilia Del Bono

  Institute for Social and Economic Research

  6 shared

• Paco Martorell

  University of California, Davis

  6 shared

• Victoria L. Prowse

  5 shared

• Heather Royer

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Oxford University

• Other

  Center for Labor Economics at UC Berkeley