Sean Corcoran

Sean P. Corcoran is Associate Professor of Educational Economics at NYU Steinhardt, affiliated faculty of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and associate director of NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy (IESP). Dr. Corcoran earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2003. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at California State University, Sacramento (2003-2005) and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2005-2006). In 2012-13 he was a visitor at the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) at Stanford University.

Dr. Corcoran’s research interests are in the Economics of Education, State and Local Public Finance, and Applied Microeconomics. His published papers have examined long-run trends in teacher quality, the impact of income inequality and school finance reform on the level and equity of education funding in the United States, the properties of "value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness, and the high school choices of middle school students in New York City. Together with colleagues at NYU, Columbia, and Seton Hall University, he is conducting one of the largest randomized control trials of information supports for school choice ever conducted.