The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is typically applied to gender or racial earnings gaps with the goal of determining the percent of the gap that can be attributed to differences in attributes between groups and to labor market discrimination. We apply this technique to the racial gap...

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience for Youth (1997 cohort) are used to examine the urban school achievement gap. Specifically, we use the Blinder-Oaxaca technique to decompose differences in Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery scores for students who...

Stochastic frontier regression is used to examine the effect of introducing prevailing wage legislation on public school construction efficiency in British Columbia. Prior to the legislation, public school projects were from 16% to 19% smaller, in terms of square feet, than comparable private...

type="main" xml:id="irel12072-abs-0001" <p>The effect of prevailing wage laws on the cost of public construction has been the subject of an ongoing public policy debate. We measure this effect by comparing the public/private construction cost differential for schools built before and after British...</p>