A Little Now for a Lot Later: A Look at a Texas Advanced Placement Incentive...
The Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program pays both students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The program was implemented in schools serving primarily low-income,...
View ArticleThe Effects of a Novel Incentive-Based High-School Intervention on College...
I analyze the longer-run effects of a program that pays both 11th and 12th grade students and teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement exams. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I...
View ArticleOne for the Road: Public Transportation, Alcohol Consumption, and Intoxicated...
We exploit arguably exogenous train schedule changes in Washington DC to investigate the relationship between public transportation provision, the risky decision to consume alcohol, and the criminal...
View ArticleCost Should Be No Barrier: An Evaluation of the First Year of Harvard's...
This paper evaluates the first year of Harvard’s Financial Aid Initiative, which increased aid and recruiting for students from low income backgrounds. Using rich data from the Census and...
View ArticleStudent Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence From the...
The reshuffling of students due to the end of student busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg provides a unique opportunity to investigate the relationship between changes in student attributes and changes in...
View ArticleTeaching Students and Teaching Each Other: The Importance of Peer Learning...
Using student examination data linked to longitudinal teacher personnel data, we document that a teacher’s students have larger test score gains when she experiences an improvement in the observable...
View ArticleAbility-Grouping and Academic Inequality: Evidence From Rule-Based Student...
In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned to secondary schools after fifth grade based on achievement tests, leading to large differences in the school environments to which students of differing...
View ArticleCan Higher-Achieving Peers Explain the Benefits to Attending Selective...
Using exogenous secondary school assignments to remove self-selection bias to schools and peers, I obtain credible estimates of (1) the effect of attending schools with higher-achieving peers, and (2)...
View ArticleDo Students Benefit From Attending Better Schools?: Evidence From Rule-based...
In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned to secondary schools after fifth grade based on achievement tests, leading to large differences in the school environments to which students of differing...
View ArticleSchool Competition and Teacher Labor Markets: Evidence from Charter School...
I analyze changes in teacher turnover, hiring, effectiveness, and salaries at traditional public schools after the opening of a nearby charter school. While I find small effects on turnover overall,...
View ArticleMatch Quality, Worker Productivity, and Worker Mobility: Direct Evidence From...
I investigate the importance of the match between teachers and schools for student achievement. I show that teacher effectiveness increases after a move to a different school, and I estimate...
View ArticleSingle-Sex Schools, Student Achievement, and Course Selection: Evidence from...
Existing studies on single-sex schooling suffer from biases because students who attend single-sex schools differ in unmeasured ways from those who do not. In Trinidad and Tobago students are assigned...
View ArticleDo Social Connections Reduce Moral Hazard? Evidence from the New York City...
We investigate the role of social networks in aligning the incentives of agents in settings with incomplete contracts. We study the New York City taxi industry where taxis are often leased and...
View ArticleRecruiting, Retaining, and Creating Quality Teachers
This article synthesizes the research literature on how to ensure that the teaching workforce is effective. It offers three approaches to improving effectiveness: attract talented individuals into the...
View ArticleTeacher Quality at the High-School Level: The Importance of Accounting for...
Unlike in elementary school, high-school teacher effects may be confounded with both selection to tracks and unobserved track-level treatments. I document sizable confounding track effects, and show...
View ArticleDo College-Prep Programs Improve Long-Term Outcomes?
This paper presents an analysis of the longer-run effects of a college-preparatory program implemented in inner-city schools that provided teacher training in addition to payments to eleventh- and...
View ArticleNon-Cognitive Ability, Test Scores, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from 9th...
This paper presents a model where students have cognitive and non-cognitive ability, and a teacher’s effect on long-run outcomes is a combination of her effects on both ability-types. Conditional on...
View ArticleReducing Moral Hazard in Employment Relationships: Experimental Evidence on...
Moral hazard is endemic to employment relationships and firms often use performance pay and managerial control to address this problem. While performance pay has received much empirical attention,...
View ArticleThe Effect of School Finance Reforms on the Distribution of Spending,...
The school finance reforms (SFRs) that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused some of the most dramatic changes in the structure of K–12 education spending in U.S. history. We...
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