This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is...

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely...

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low birth weight children from both...

This paper examines the influence of parental wealth and income on children's college attendance and parental financing decisions, graduation, and quality of college attended, and whether parental financing affects the subsequent indebtedness of parents and children. We find that higher levels...

We estimate long-run impacts to the Pathways to Education program, a comprehensive set of coaching, tutoring, group activities and financial incentives offered to disadvantaged students beginning in Grade 9. High school administrative records are matched to income tax records to follow...

Our paper studies the effects of dialect-speaking on job characteristics of Dutch workers, in particular on their hourly wages. The unconditional difference in median hourly wages between standard Dutch speakers and dialect speakers is about 10.6% for males and 6.7% for females. If we take into...

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context...

Using a unique survey of adults in Turkey, we find that an increase in educational attainment, due to an exogenous secular education reform, decreases women's propensity to identify themselves as religious, lowers their tendency to wear a religious head cover (head scarf, turban or burka) and...

We collect data on operations, targets and human resources management practices in over 1,800 schools educating 15-year-olds in eight countries. Overall, we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. The UK, Sweden, Canada and the US obtain the...

We study the effects of managerial practices in schools on students' outcomes. We measure managerial practices using the World Management Survey, a methodology that enables us to construct robust measures of management quality comparable across countries.We find substantial heterogeneity in...