In the United States, people with more education vote more. But, we know little about why education increases political participation or whether higher-quality education increases civic participation. We study applicants to Boston charter schools, using school lotteries to estimate charter...

Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate...

School districts in the US and around the world are increasingly moving away from traditional neighborhood school assignment, in which pupils attend closest schools to their homes. Instead, they allow families to choose from schools within district boundaries. This creates a market with parental...

This paper asks whether improving the quality of public schools can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of school quality improvements early in children's lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit...

We model charter school entry and choice of educational practices. Student achievement depends on cognitive ability, motivation, effort, and match of school curriculum to ability. Exercising charter school autonomy over curriculum, to maximize achievement gains, the charter sets curriculum to...

This paper reviews the research on the impacts of charter school attendance on students' academic and other outcomes, the mechanisms behind those effects, and the influence of charter schools on nearby traditional public schools, almost three decades after the first charter school was...

Proponents of school choice argue that it improves educational outcomes by allowing parents to self-select into schools that are most effective for their children. Contrary to these arguments, empirical evidence suggests that parents may not incorporate school effectiveness or match quality when...

In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more...

By the mid-nineteenth century school enrollment rates in the United States exceeded those of any other nation in the world and by the early twentieth century the United States had accomplished mass education at all levels. No country was able to close the gap until the last quarter of the...

We examine the effect of attending stand-alone technical high schools on student short- and long-term outcomes using a regression discontinuity design. Male students are 10 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school and have half a semester less time enrolled in college, although...