Using data from a group incentive program that provides cash bonuses to teachers whose students perform well on standardized tests, we estimate the impact of incentive strength on student achievement. These awards are based on the performances of students within a grade, school and subject,...

We examine intergenerational mobility (IM) in educational attainment in Africa since independence using census data. First, we map IM across 27 countries and more than 2,800 regions, documenting wide cross-country and especially within-country heterogeneity. Inertia looms large as differences in...

Public health insurance programs comprise a large share of federal and state government expenditures. Although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of these programs on health care utilization and health outcomes, little prior work has examined the long-term effects and resultant health...

This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing in particular on the tradeoff between the quality of an institution and the fit between a school and a student. We first discuss the conditions under which affirmative action for...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of...

Teacher collective bargaining is a highly debated feature of the education system in the US. This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining laws on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes, exploiting the timing of passage of duty-tobargain...

This paper offers a comprehensive account of the intergenerational transmission of education across religious groups in Africa, home to some of the world’s largest Christian and Muslim communities. First, we use census data from 20 countries to construct new upward and downward...

Many low skilled jobs have been substituted away for machines in Europe, or eliminated, much more so than in the US, while technological progress at the quot;topquot;, i.e. at the high-tech sector, is faster in the US than in Europe. This paper suggests that the main difference between Europe...

This paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation,...