We present results from a large-scale experimental evaluation of an ambitious attempt to improve management quality in Indian schools (implemented in 1,774 randomly-selected schools). The intervention featured several global "best practices" including comprehensive assessments, detailed school...

Many factors including incentive-pay, powerful shareholders, and takeover threats push for-profits managers towards maximizing shareholder value. One of the most striking factors about non-profit firms is that they have no comparable governance institutions, and the only check on managers are...

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the...

We attempt to make inferences about the elasticity of the government's demand for specific weapons by analyzing the statistical relationship between quantity and cost revisions across the population of major weapon systems, using data contained in the Pentagon's Selected Acquisition Reports. The...

This paper takes advantage of a unique policy change to examine how principals make decisions regarding teacher dismissal. In 2004, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) signed a new collective bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss...

Competitive exams are a standard method for selecting civil servants. Yet, evidence on the effectiveness of such approach is mixed, and lack of personnel data limits our understanding of the mechanisms underlying this varying success. We digitize personnel and financial data to study the impacts...

The current paper presents a method of deciding the question of whether any given stage in the budget process is an example of the "political" or the "bureaucratic" model. We then use it to study local government spending on education. The basis for our method is the important difference between...