This paper tests the hypothesis that compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between the years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school start age created by children's date of birth provides a...

This paper presents an overview and interpretation of the literature relating school quality to students' subsequent labor market success. We begin with a simple theoretical model that describes the determination of schooling and earnings with varying school quality. A key insight of the model...

This paper tries to reconcile evidence from the microeconometric and empirical macro growth literatures on the effect of schooling on income and GDP growth. Much microeconometric evidence suggest that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries. At a...

This paper examines evidence on the effect of class size on student achievement. First, it is shown that results of quantitative summaries of the literature, such as Hanushek (1997), depend critically on whether studies are accorded equal weight. Hanushek summarizes 277 estimates extracted from...

This paper uses job applications- data to test the existence of non-competitive, ex-ante rents in the labor market. We first examine whether jobs that pay the legal minimum wage face an excessively of labor as measured by the number of job applications received for the most recent positions...

Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn...

Previous work shows that higher levels of education quality (as measured by international student achievement tests) increases growth rates of national income. This paper begins by confirming those findings in an analysis involving more countries over more time with additional controls. We then...

Substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap. Our results, based on both Texas Schools Project (TSP) administrative data and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS), differ noticeably from other recent analyses of the black-white...

Attention to the quality of human capital in different countries naturally leads to concerns about how school policies relate to student performance. The data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provide a way of comparing performance in different schooling systems....

This paper provides a long-term follow-up of students who participated in the Tennessee STAR experiment. The Tennessee STAR experiment randomly assigned 11,600 elementary school students and their teachers to a small class, regular-size class or regular-size class with a teacher-aide. The...