The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are limited to children with Catholic backgrounds. A simple model of inter-system competition predicts that incentives for effort are...

Adoption of innovations by firms and workers is an important part of the process of technological change. Many prior studies find that highly educated workers tend to adopt new technologies faster than those with less education. Such positive correlations between the level of education and the...

This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as: hiring and firing teachers, monitoring instruction, and maintaining student discipline, among others. We measure the effect of individual principals on gains in student math and reading achievement...

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The paper analyzes three possible general methods to measure the price and quantity of nonmarket government...

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. The approach allows to control for group-level unobservables and to solve the reflection problem, without imposing ad hoc exclusion restrictions or requiring...

This study extends recent findings of a relationship between the relative age of students among their peers and their probability of disability classification. Using three nationally representative surveys spanning 1988-2004 and grades K-10, we find that an additional month of relative age...

This paper uses a unique policy change in Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, to provide direct evidence on the effect of reducing the length of high school on labour market outcomes for high school graduates. In 1999, the Ontario government eliminated the fifth year of education...

Using the nationally representative longitudinal Youth in Transition Survey, this paper examines the argument that inferior educational outcomes of various visible minorities and immigrants can be attributed to their socio-economic disadvantages, while superior outcomes of other visible...

Studies based on instrumental variable techniques suggest that the value of a high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the size of the benefiÂ…t for students who will go on to post-secondary education. To help Â…fill this gap, I measure the...