Maria Fitzpatrick

Maria Fitzpatrick

Maria Donovan Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy and Management.  She is also an Affiliate in the CESifo Research Network.  Her main area of focus is the economics of education.  Specifically her research interests are focused on early childhood education policies, teacher labor markets and higher education.  

Before arriving at Cornell Maria Fitzpatrick was a Searle Freedom Trust postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, where she was both an Institute for Education Sciences and Spencer Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow.  She obtained her B.A. in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In her research, Dr. Fitzpatrick's focuses on two broad themes:

Early childhood education policies:  Recent decades have seen increased interest in early childhood education and care programs as a way to promote children's development and family well-being.  This increased interest has led to increased government intervention of various forms, from regulation to government provision.  Fitzpatrick's work has examined the effects of government provision of early childhood education (namely universal pre-k) on children's long-term academic achievement and family decision making about child care use and parental labor supply.  More recently, Fitzpatrick and her colleagues are examining the effects of both government provision in and regulation of the early childhood care industry on the supply side (workers and firms) of the industry.

Teacher labor markets:  The quality of children's schooling experiences has been closely linked to the quality of the individuals students receive as teachers.  Many local, state and federal policies are putting increased focus towards improving schools while the recent downturn has put the fiscal decisions of the public sector under close scrutiny.  Understanding how teachers make decisions about where to work and how long to work, particularly in response to their government provided wages and benefits, is therefore an imperative.  Fitzpatrick's work has focused on whether public school employees value their retirement benefits at the same level it costs taxpayers to provide them.  She is investigating how incentives between state and local governments that arise implicitly in the structure of teacher compensation affect the pattern of teacher wages.  With colleagues, she is also examining how responsive teachers are to retirement incentives and what effect the removal of senior teachers has on children's academic achievement.

• B.A., economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000
• M.A., economics, University of Virginia, 2004
• Ph.D., economics, University of Virginia, 2008

PAM 5010: Education Policy

PAM 6370: Microeconomics for Policy Analysis

http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/people/maria_fitzpatrick.cfm

http://www.cpp.cornell.edu/
http://www.cesifo-group.de/portal/page/portal/ifoHome
http://ciser.cornell.edu/NYCRDC/home.shtml

“The Early Childhood Care and Education Workforce: Understanding Changes from 1990 through 2010”  with Daphna Bassok, Susanna Loeb and Agustina Paglayan. Forthcoming, Education Finance and Policy. 

“Revising Our Thinking about the Relationship between Maternal Labor Supply and Preschool.” 2012. Journal of Human Resources.
 
 “What a Difference a Day Makes: Estimating the Effects of Kindergarten on Children’s Test Scores.” with David Grissmer and Sarah Hastedt. 2011. Economics of Education Review. Vol. 30: Issue 2, pp. 269-279.  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775710001184
 
"Preschoolers Enrolled and Mothers at Work? The Effects of Universal Pre-Kindergarten." 2010. Journal of Labor Economics. Vol 28: No 1, pp. 51-85.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/648666
 
"Starting School at Four: The Effect of Universal Pre-Kindergarten on Children's Academic Achievement," 2008. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 8: No. 1 (Advances), Article 46. Available at: http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/vol8/iss1/art46.