Uncovering the effects of school racial composition on achievement is difficult, because racial mixing in the schools is not an accident but instead represents a complex mixture of government and family choices. While the goals of the integration of schools legally inspired by Brown v. Board of...

This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and non-random selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely used to infer hospital quality. However, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may...

Most students change schools at some point in their academic careers, but some change very frequently and some schools experience a great deal of turnover. Many researchers, teachers, and administrators argue that mobility harms students, particularly disadvantaged students in high turnover,...

This paper applies direct tests for adverse selection and moral hazard in the market for child care. A unique data set containing quality measures of various characteristics of child care provided by 746 rooms in 400 centers, as well as the evaluation of the same attributes by 3,490 affiliated...

This paper examines the effects of private schooling on adolescent non-market behaviors. We control for differences between private and public school students by making use of the rich set of covariates available with our NELS micro-dataset. We also employ an instrumental-variables strategy that...

Most physicians today treat a variety of patients within their practices and operate in markets where a variety of insurance arrangements co-exist. In this paper, we propose several theoretical explanations for physician treatment patterns when the patient population is heterogeneous at the...

We use data from a sample of day care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and the quality of the child care service provided, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality derived from an instrument designed by developmental psychologists. This measure of...

This paper examines the economic and empirical foundations of the aggregate evidence on the effect of schooling quality on earnings. A common framework is presented which nests all previous studies as special cases. We discuss two crucial identifying assumptions and test them. The first...

Using a newly compiled data set, this paper estimates multi- product translog cost functions for 399 child care centers from California, Colorado, Connecticut, and North Carolina. Quality of child care is controlled by a quality index, which has been shown to be positively related to child...

Estimating the returns to education remains an active area of research amongst applied economists. Most studies that estimate the causal return to education exploit changes in schooling and/or labor laws to generate exogenous differences in education. An implicit assumption is that more time in...