Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show...

This study documents an investigation of how intermetropolitan differences in transit and highway service levels; as well as overall urban development patterns, affect auto ownership and use. Specifically, this paper presents models of the determinants of auto ownership and mode choice for...

Developed over the past decade by the Urban Studies Croup of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the NBER Urban Simulation Model is primarily a model of the urban housing market. It represents other urban phenomena such as industrial location, transportation systems, and changes in the...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potentialsources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in amore diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that...

School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of...