Popular wisdom holds that publishers revise college textbooks mainly to kill off the secondary market for used books. While this behavior might be profitable if consumers are myopic, uninformed or have high short-run discount rates (that exceed the publishers'), neoclassical authors have noted...

During the last two decades, median instructional spending per full-time equivalent (FTE) student at American 4-year colleges and universities has grown at a slower rate than median spending per FTE student in a number of other expenditure categories including academic support, student services...

We present results from a randomized study of a well-defined use of computers in schools: a popular instructional computer program for pre-algebra and algebra. We assess the program using a test designed to target pre-algebra and algebra skills. Students randomly assigned to computer-aided...

Information and communication technologies, such as laptops, can be used for educational purposes as they provide users with computational tools, information storage and communication opportunities, but these devices may also pose as distractors that may tamper with the learning process. This...

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students' stated beliefs and attitudes. We exploit a major textbook reform in China that was rolled out between 2004 and 2010 with the explicit intention of shaping youths' ideology. To measure its effect, we present evidence from a novel survey...

This paper compares retrospective and prospective analyses of the effect of flip charts on test scores in rural Kenyan schools. Retrospective estimates that focus on subjects for which flip charts are used suggest that flip charts raise test scores by up to 20 percent of a standard deviation....

A vibrant literature has emerged that suggests willingness to pay and willingness to accept measures of value are quite different for inexperienced consumers but that value differences erode with market experience. One potential shortcoming of this literature is that market experience is...

A key concern about counterfeits and weak intellectual property protection is that they may hamper innovation by displacing legitimate sales. This paper combines a natural policy experiment with randomized lab experiments to estimate the heterogeneous impacts of counterfeiting on the sales and...

We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average,...

As economic expansions raise employment and wages, associated shifts in income and time constraints would be expected to also impact individuals' health. This study utilizes information from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (1990-2007) to explore the relationship between the risk...