This paper uses play-by-play accounts of virtually all regular season National Football League games for 1998-2000 to analyze teams' choices on fourth down between trying for a first down and kicking. Dynamic programming is used to estimate the values of possessing the ball at different points...

Individuals who engage in "judging" - that is, rendering a determination in a dispute or contest between two parties - might be influenced by public pressure to favor one of the parties. Many rules and arrangements seek to insulate such individuals from public pressure or to address the effects...

This paper reviews a set of recent studies that have attempted to measure the causal effect of education on labor market earnings by using institutional features of the supply side of the education system as exogenous determinants of schooling outcomes. A simple theoretical model that highlights...

This paper examines the properties of exams and markets as alternative allocation devices under borrowing constraints. Exams dominate markets in terms of matching efficiency. Whether aggregate consumption is greater under exams than under markets depends on the power of the exam technology; for...

This paper analyzes data from Project STAR, an experiment in which 11,600 Tennessee kindergarten students and teachers were randomly assigned to one of three types of classes beginning in the 1985-86 school year: small classes (13-17 students), regular-size classes (22-25 students) teacher's...

This paper presents a survey and interpretation of recent research on the return to education. The empirical findings in a series of current papers suggest that the causal effect of education on earnings is understated by standard estimation methods. Using a simple model of optimal schooling...

Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The three-fold increase in direct costs of education per student in the past three decades was caused by increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff inputs,...

We examine how economic stratification affects inequality and growth over time. We study economies where heterogenous agents interact through local public goods or externalities (school funding, neighborhood effects) and economy-wide linkages (complementary skills. knowledge spillovers). We...