Previous findings from experimental and non-experimental studies have demonstrated that teachers differ in their effectiveness. In addition, evidence from non-experimental studies has indicated that teacher effects can last up to five years. This study used high-quality data from a four-year...

Given that previous findings on the social distribution of the effects of small classes have been mixed and inconclusive, in the present study I attempted to shed light on the mechanism through which small classes affect the achievement of low- and high-achieving students. I used data from a...

Multilevel models are widely used in education and social science research. However, the effects of omitting levels of the hierarchy on the variance decomposition and the clustering effects have not been well documented. This paper discusses how omitting one level in three-level models affects...

Identifying the effect of parental incomes on child outcomes is difficult due to the correlation of unobserved ability, education levels and income. Previous research has relied on the use of instrumental variables to identify the effect of a change in household income on the young adult...

Existing research examining the self-selection of immigrants suffers from a lack of information on the immigrants' labor force activities in the home country, quotas limiting who is allowed to enter the destination country, and non-economic factors such as internal civil strife in the home...

Using recently-available data from the New Immigrant Survey, we find that previous self-employment experience in an immigrant's country of origin is an important determinant of their self-employment status in the U.S., increasing the probability of being self-employed by about 7 percent. Our...

Evidence from Project STAR has suggested that on average small classes increase student achievement. However, thus far researchers have focused on computing mean differences in student achievement between smaller and larger classes. In this study I focus on the distribution of the small class...

In this paper we examine whether where one acquires their human capital matters in earnings regressions. We focus on a nationally-representative US data set and find that there is little difference between a measure of total years of education and measures for US and foreign-based years of...

This study examines the wage gender gap of young adults in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000 in the US. Using quantile regression we estimate the gender gap across the entire wage distribution. We also study the importance of high school characteristics in predicting future labor market performance. We...

This study examines the gender gap in wages of young adults in the late 1970s, mid 1980s, and 2000, in the middle and the tails of the wage distribution using quantile regression. We also examine the importance of school quality indicators in predicting future labor market performance. We...