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 study estimates the effect of expanding enrollment possibilities in early eduction on the achievement of young children. To do so it exploits two features of the Dutch schooling system. First, children are allowed to enroll in school on their fourth birthday. Second, children having their...

The Milwaukee voucher program, as implemented in 1990, allowed only non- sectarian private schools to participate in the program. Following a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, the program saw a major shift and entered into its second phase, when religious private schools were allowed to...

This paper analyzes the impact of voucher design on student sorting, and more specifically investigates whether there are feasible ways of designing vouchers that can reduce or eliminate student sorting. It studies these questions in the context of the first five years of the Milwaukee voucher...

The Education Reform Program launched in the mid-1990s by the Government of Bolivia had important accomplishments, particularly by increasing the coverage of primary education. However, the high rates of coverage observed at national level conceal the inequality in the distribution of schooling...

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly-changing parental education levels determine children's school enrollment to a greater degree than education...

In this paper, I analyze the behavior of public schools facing vouchers. The literature on the effect of voucher programs on public schools typically focuses on student and mean school scores. This paper tries to go inside the black box to investigate some of the ways in which schools facing the...

This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...

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...

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...