Reassessing the Impact of Power Plants on Student Achievement: New Evidence from Ohio's Taxable Valuations

In the United States, a substantial share of K–12 public school funding is raised locally, particularly through property taxes (Marchand & Weber, 2020; NCES, 2020). A growing economics literature examines the relationship between the siting of large-scale industrial facilities and local educational outcomes but reports mixed results (e.g., Brunner et al., 2022; Gupta and Rodriguez, 2025; Schiller and Slechten, 2025). Although these studies consistently find positive effects on school revenues and expenditures, their estimated effects on student achievement are largely insignificant. We argue that part of the null result may instead reflect empirical designs based on the Difference-in-Differences (DD) framework, particularly when control districts are also exposed to contemporaneous tax-base shocks from other, non-studied energy facilities. This paper examines how local power plants affect student achievement in Ohio from 2009 to 2019. We use changes in nameplate capacity across all power plant types to measure fluctuations in the local property-tax base. Our results show that changes in local power plant capacity significantly affect student achievement, but the effects emerge with heterogeneous lags across subjects and fade over time. We also show that applying the DD framework to our data yields null effects similar to those in prior studies, whereas applying our empirical model to the publicly available SEDA test-score data used by Brunner et al. (2022) recovers statistically significant effects.