from Wellesley College in 1967, a master's degree from the London School of Economics in 1968 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, writing a thesis on the relationship between local public expenditures and the composition of the property tax base under Richard Musgrave and Martin Feldstein.
Other signees of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, Robert M. Solow, George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen, as well as numerous others.
[9] Therein, she has frequently collaborated with Charles Clotfelter, Jacob Vigdor as well as with her husband and fellow educational researcher Edward Fiske.
[11] Ladd has also contributed to the debate on how to optimize state aid in the U.S. in order to offset fiscal disparities (low resources or high costs) across communities (with Katharine Bradbury, Mark Perrault, Andrew Reschovsky and John Yinger).
In Dallas, she finds performance-based school accountability to increase the outcomes of Hispanic and Caucasian 7th-graders but not Afro-American students, and to decrease drop-out and principal turnover rates.
[24] Ladd has also performed research on school choice and school competition outside the U.S., e.g. analyzing the liberalization and decentralization of New Zealand's compulsory state education system during the 1990s, which yielded many cautionary lessons about the potential long-term consequences of market-based education reforms.
[31] Moreover, they also find that teacher credentials (e.g. licensure or certification systematically and substantially affect student achievement and that the unequal distribution of teacher credentials by race and socioeconomic status of high school students exacerbates gaps between demographic groups' educational achievement.
[33] With regard to the economics of education, Ladd has contributed substantially to research on the relationship between poverty and education: Together with Jens Ludwig and Greg Duncan, Ladd evaluates the impact of the Moving to Opportunity programme of residential mobility, wherein volunteering low-income families were randomly assigned to either receive rental subsidies for housing in low-poverty areas as well as counseling and housing search assistance, to only receive unrestricted rental subsidies or to a control group, finding that assignment to the first group considerably raised elementary school children's performance in reading and math, though there is also some evidence that teens in both experimental groups experience increases in grade retentions, drop-out rates and disciplinary actions at school due to differences between the academic and behavioural standards between their new and old schools.
[35] Another area of research concerns the impact of technology on education, wherein Ladd, Vigdor and Erika Martinez confirm earlier findings of large gaps between different racial and socioeconomic groups' access and use of home computers and observe that the introduction of home computer technology and high-speed Internet access in households tends to modestly decrease students' math and reading test scores.