In theory, the publication of performance ratings may improve performance through reputation concerns and peer effects or impede performance by demoralizing employees. This paper uses school-district data and a regression discontinuity design to answer how consumers and employees respond to...

While leveraging parents has the potential to increase student performance, programs that do so are often costly to implement or they target younger children. We partner text-messaging technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of information to parents at...

This paper studies the impact of a desegregation ruling on several medium-run outcomes. This ruling mandates that seven school districts, which serve higher-income, predominantly-white families, accept a group of minority elementary school students who apply to transfer from a nearby,...

Given significant expenditures on education technologies, an important question is whether these products are adopted by their end users and are effective in practice. This paper studies the adoption, diffusion, and effects of one type of technology that is increasingly ubiquitous:...

This paper uses a field experiment to answer how information frictions between parents and their children affect investments in education and how much reducing these frictions can improve student achievement. In Los Angeles, a random sample of parents was provided detailed information about...

Truancy correlates with many risky behaviors and adverse outcomes. We use detailed administrative data on by-class absences to construct social networks based on students who miss class together. We simulate these networks and use permutation tests to show that certain students systematically...