American Institutes for Research

Umut Özek is currently a senior researcher at AIR and an affiliated researcher with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER). He was formerly a research associate with the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute. His research interests include the economics of education, public economics, and health economics.

Dr. Özek’s recent research focuses on school choice reforms with emphasis on open enrollment programs, investigating the empirical aspects of such programs by analyzing their impact on households’ public school choice behavior and student outcomes as well as the theoretical aspect by evaluating different assignment mechanisms that are commonly used to implement these programs.