[5] He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, CESifo, and J-PAL,[6] and is a Principal Investigator of the CLIMB Initiative,[7] which seeks to use big data analysis to identify higher education policies and programmes in support of students.
[8] Key findings of his research include: Concerning early childhood education, Deming has studied the impact of Head Start, finding that participants gain 0.23 SD on a summary index of young adult outcomes, which closes one-third of the gap between children from the median and bottom quartile family income.
In earlier research with Susan Dynarski, he has also highlighted criticized redshirting, i.e., the continuously increasing practice of postponing the entry of children into school, arguing that little evidence supports the notion that doing so benefits children and some evidence suggests that redshirting reduces educational attainment by increasing high school dropout rates and depresses lifetime earnings by delaying entry into the labour market.
[9] Deming estimated that, in North Carolina, giving students and their families the choice which secondary school they attend substantially helped to reduce crime and incarceration rates among those given the choice, with the impacts being concentrated among high-risk youth whose propensity to become criminal and to commit severe crimes is cut by about half.
In further work with Thomas Kane, Douglas Staiger and Judith Hastings, Deming finds that giving such the choice of school to students and their families induces them to generally choose public schools that are generally of higher quality, which in turn tends to raise girls' college attainment as these are most likely to benefit from improved learning environments.