The view that the returns to public educational investments are highest for early childhood interventions stems primarily from several influential randomized trials - Abecedarian, Perry, and the Early Training Project - that point to super-normal returns to preschool interventions. This paper...

This paper describes a new method for assigning letter grades to students based on their raw scores, which I call Multi-Curve Grading (MCG). The intuition behind the method is that a class can be composed of several different subgroups, each of which should be assigned a different grade. In...

Previous studies about the academic publishing process consider the publication delay as starting from the submission to the publishing journal. This ignores the potential delay caused by rejections received from previous journals. Knowing how many times papers are submitted prior to publication...

A woman may choose to become more educated, partly because she wishes to emulate those around her. A behavioral model suggests that she is less likely to lose her baby than the less educated by flouting basic rules of health. Estimates of a three-equation model suggest that low-weight births are...

The study highlights the large and rising cost of the disease: an estimated $132 billion, or approximately $92 billion in direct healthcare expenditures and $40 billion in lost productivity attributed to missed workdays, disability, and early mortality. After adjusting for differences in...

The rising trends both in drug addiction and crime rates are of major public concern in Germany. Surprisingly, the economic theory of crime seems to ignore the drugs-crime nexus, whereas the criminological literature considers illicit drug use a main reason of criminal activities. This paper...

At present, a first round of hospital benchmarking as required by German law on health care reform takes place. After extensive discussions between hospitals and insurance companies, which are jointly responsible to deliver benchmarking results, a method with some peculiar characteristics was...

Broadband access provides users with high speed, always-on connectivity to the Internet. Due to its superiority, broadband is seen as the way for consumers and firms to exploit the great potentials of new applications. This has generated a policy debate on how to stimulate adoption of broadband...

Bilginin iktisadi açýdan öneminin artmasý, konuyla ilgili olarak yapýlan akademik çalýþmalarýn çoðalmasýna ve ilgi görmesine neden olmaktadýr. Teorik ve ampirik çalýþmalarda bilginin elde edilmesi, yayýlmasý ve iktisadi geliþmeyi etkilemesi gibi konulara sýklýkla yer...

We use a Hotelling linear city model to study competition between open source and proprietary software, where only the producer of the proprietary software aims at maximizing the profit. The producer of the proprietary software must decide on compatibility. Different compatibility strategies...