We examine how the legalization programs of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) have affected immigration to the United States since the late 1980s. Our empirical approach exploits variation in IRCA’s timing and the magnitude of the legalization shock across metropolitan...

It is widely documented that U.S. students score below their OECD counterparts on international achievement tests, but it is less commonly known that ultimately, U.S. native adults catch up. In this paper, we explore institutional explanations for differences in the evolution of literacy over...

Educational interventions are often evaluated and compared on the basis of their impacts on test scores. Decades of research have produced two empirical regularities: interventions in later grades tend to have smaller effects than the same interventions in earlier grades, and the test score...