Biography

Richard Buddin is a senior labor economist and education policy expert at RAND. In the past five years, Dr. Buddin published about a dozen articles evaluating various dimensions of charter school performance. The research used value-added methods to measure student outcomes with longitudinal student-level data. The recent Charter School Achievement Consensus Panel rated this research as some of the best research on charter schools to date. Dr. Buddin is also employing fixed effects and multilevel modeling approaches to evaluate teacher quality under a five-year Institute of Education Sciences study. The study examines whether teacher performance on state licensure tests translates into better student outcomes in the classroom. Dr. Buddin recently conducted a study of teacher merit pay. The study used a multilevel model to disentangle the effects of student, teacher, and school characteristics on student achievement. Finally, Dr. Buddin led an investigation of how employer-sponsored tuition assistance for part-time college enrollment affected employee retention. The study used instrumental variable and propensity score methods to identify whether tuition assistance improved employee retention. In addition to research, Dr. Buddin is a Professor of Economics in the RAND Graduate School and a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.