This paper is an examination of how autoregressive earnings models commonly used to evaluate job-training programs can produce badly biased estimates of both the magnitude and the temporal pattern of program impacts. Ashenfelter's results are used to illustrate this point, and a new, more...

This paper examines the benefits and costs of Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) Title II-A programs for economically disadvantaged adults and out-of-school youths. It is based on a 21,000-person randomized experiment conducted within ongoing Title II-A programs at 16 local JTPA Service...

Half of college students drop out without completing a degree. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and degree completion. I use quasi-experimental methodology to analyze two state scholarship programs. The programs increase the share of the exposed population with a...

While the persistence of criminal activity is well documented, this may be due to persistence in the unobserved determinants of crime. There are good reasons to believe, however, that there may actually be a negative relationship between crime rates in a particular area due to temporal...

Plagiarism appears to be a common problem among college students, yet there is little evidence on the effectiveness of interventions designed to minimize plagiarism. This study presents the results of a field experiment that evaluated the effects of a web-based educational tutorial in reducing...

Low-achieving students in many school districts are retained in a grade to allow them to gain the academic or social skills that teachers believe are necessary to succeed academically. In this paper, we use plausibly exogenous variation in retention generated by a test-based promotion policy to...

While there is a substantial literature on the relationship between general teacher characteristics and student learning, school districts and states often rely on in-service teacher training as a part of school reform efforts. Recent school reform efforts in Chicago provide an opportunity to...

This paper constructs a statistical model of learning that suggests a systematic way of measuring the persistence of treatment effects in education. This method is straightforward to implement, allows for comparisons across educational treatments, and can be related to intuitive benchmarks. We...