Using only ordinal axioms, we characterize several multigroup school segregationindices: the Atkinson Indices for the class of school districts with a given fixed numberof ethnic groups and the Mutual Information Index for the class of all districts.Properties of other school segregation indices...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of makingschools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decisionmakingby local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most ofthe variation in local...

This paper gives an axiomatic characterization of the Atkinson indices of segregationfor the multigroup case using a small number of purely ordinal axioms. We showthat the symmetric Atkinson index represents the unique ordering that treats ethnicgroups symmetrically, that is invariant to...

In developing countries, rising incomes, increased demand for more skilled labor, and government investments of considerable resources on building and equipping schools and paying teachers have contributed to global convergence in enrollment rates and completed years of schooling. Nevertheless,...

We propose a set of axioms for the measurement of school-based segregation withany number of ethnic groups. These axioms are motivated by two criteria. The first isevenness: how much do ethnic groups’ distributions across schools differ? The secondis representativeness: how different are...

A broad literature seeks to assess the importance of schools, proxies for school quality, andfamily background on children's achievement growth using the education production function.Using rich data from the Philippines, we introduce and estimate a model that imposes littlestructure on the...

We describe a new and flexible framework for modeling school effects. Like previouswork in this area, we introduce an empirical model that evaluates school performance onthe basis of student level test-score gains. Unlike previous work, however, we introducea flexible model that relates...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

This paper reviews the issues surrounding the derivation of estimates of the impact of child labor on school outcomes. The paper aims to review the current state of methodological and empirical knowledge concerning the impact of child labor on learning, to review existing data sets that could be...

Child labor's effect on academic achievement is estimated, using unique data on 3rd and 4th graders in 9 Latin American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...