Matthew Johnson

Matthew Johnson’s work focuses on education policy and measures of educator effectiveness, including teacher and school value-added models. His research interests include federal student aid and students’ borrowing decisions.

Johnson’s studies of primary, secondary, and postsecondary education include estimating teacher and school value-added models for the Pittsburgh Public Schools District as part of the Empowering Effective Teachers project. He conducted similar work for the Memphis City Schools District and New Leaders for New Schools. Johnson has led efforts to gather student- and teacher-level data from large urban school districts and used that data to examine the relationship between teacher mobility patterns and access to effective teaching for disadvantaged students.

Johnson is the principal investigator for a study examining changes in financial aid and student enrollment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities after the tightening of credit standards for the Parental Loans for Undergraduate Students program. He also has experience with quasi-experimental design evaluations and propensity score matching techniques.

Johnson, who joined Mathematica in 2010, is a member of the Human Capital and Opportunity Working Group and the Pittsburgh Public Schools Technical Advisory Committee. He has published in the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Economics of Education of Review. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University.