The paper evaluates math performance at four high-need middle schools during a four-year intervention, which was designed to help math teachers diagnose students' areas of need and to design lesson plans responsive to those needs. Before the intervention began, the researchers pre-selected four...

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs) can play a central role in skill development and higher education expansion, yet their quality varies greatly within and among countries. In this paper we explore the relationship between programs' practices and inputs (quality determinants) and...

We study the returns to experience in teaching, estimated using supervisor ratings from classroom observations. We describe the assumptions required to interpret changes in observation ratings over time as the causal effect of experience on performance. We compare two difference-in-differences...

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among...

This paper examines the scalability of the results from the Tennessee Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project, a prominent educational experiment. We explore how the misalignment between the experimental design and the econometric model affects researchers' ability to learn about the...

Colleges compete to attract students by investing in amenities such as athletics, dormitories, and student activities. We examine the effect of student consumption of postsecondary amenities on academic achievement and future donation behavior in the context of Big-Time college sports. We...

In the late 1930s, the NAACP launched a campaign to equalize Black and white teacher salaries in the de jure segregated schools of the American South. Using newly collected county panel data spanning three decades, this paper first documents heterogeneous within-state impacts of the campaign on...

Parenting is widely considered to be among the most important influences on early childhood (EC) development. But to what extent and under what circumstances can EC parenting programs improve child learning outcomes? While substantial progress has been made toward addressing these questions in...

It can be claimed that education is simply a normal consumption good and that like all other normal goods, an increase in wealth will produce an increase in the amount of schooling purchased. Increased incomes are associated with higher schooling attainment as the simple result of an income...

Unobserved ability heterogeneity has long been postulated to play a key role in human capital development. Traditional strategies to estimate education production functions do not allow for varying role or development of unobserved ability as a child ages. Such restrictions are highly...