Elizabeth Cascio is an applied economist specializing in the study of education. Her past work has documented the educational and socioeconomic ramifications of some of the most important policy and demographic shifts in the U.S. in the 20th century – the passage of landmark civil rights and federal education legislation in the 1960s, the downward extension of many state school systems to include kindergartens in the 1960s and 1970s, and the large influx of immigrants into public schools since the 1970s. Her current research projects lie more in the present day, including studies on the impacts of universal preschool, how and why the test score advantages from early intervention “fade out” across the lifecycle, and the educational response to recent economic shocks. Her research has received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Journal of Urban Economics, among other outlets.

Cascio received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in June 2003 and became a Research Fellow in July 2005. She joined the Dartmouth faculty in 2006.