We study the impact of financial incentives on higher education decisions and the choice of major. We rely on a reform whereby Israeli kibbutzim shifted from their traditional policy of equal sharing to productivity-based wages. We use for identification the staggered implementation of this...

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences for long-term schooling attainment and labor market outcomes. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli high school students who took a series of high...

Based on administrative data for five cohorts of public school children in North Carolina, we demonstrate that those born just after the cut date for starting school are likely to outperform those born just before in reading and math in middle school, and are less likely to be involved in...

This study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing management training for principals in traditional public schools in Houston, Texas, using a school-level randomized field experiment. Across two years, principals were provided 300 hours of training on lesson planning,...

This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men's wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high...

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...

The effect of evaluation on employee performance is traditionally studied in the context of the principal-agent problem. Evaluation can, however, also be characterized as an investment in the evaluated employee's human capital. We study a sample of mid-career public school teachers where we can...