Does holding schools accountable for student performance cause good teachers to leave low-performing schools? Using data from New York City, which assigns accountability grades to schools based on student achievement, I perform a regression discontinuity analysis and find evidence of the...

This paper estimates cost functions for day care centers in Massachusetts. The production technology assumed is the generalized homothetic Cobb-Douglas production function. The cost function dual to this production function is estimated separately for profit-making (P1Os) and not-for-profit...

The main purpose of this paper is to present estimates of production and cost functions obtained from using a time-series, cross-section data set pertaining to Israeli industry, We include a detailed list of heterogeneity controls in the specifications which substantially enhances the...

Using a newly compiled data set, this paper provides insights into the characteristics of the child care industry. First, there is no difference in average quality of the services produced between nonprofit and for-profit centers. This indicates that nonprofit status cannot be taken as a signal...

Using a newly compiled data set, this paper estimates multi- product translog cost functions for 399 child care centers from California, Colorado, Connecticut, and North Carolina. Quality of child care is controlled by a quality index, which has been shown to be positively related to child...

We propose a simple method for estimating cost functions in the presence of endogenous and unobserved quality. The theory of production, the equilibrium conditions implied by optimizing behavior, and exogenous influences on product demand are used to identify the model. An important advantage of...

This paper focuses on how changes in the economic and regulatory environment have affected production costs and product characteristics in the automobile industry. We estimate cost functions characteristics. Then we examine how this cost surface has changed over time and how these changes relate...

We use data from a sample of day care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and the quality of the child care service provided, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality derived from an instrument designed by developmental psychologists. This measure of...

One of the fundamental facts of the environment hospitals face is uncertainty over demand for their services. This uncertainty leads hospitals to hold excess standby capacity to avoid turning away patients. In this paper we reformulate the theory of cost and production to take account of this...

This paper presents several techniques for recovering cost function estimates for electricity generation from a model of optimal bidding behavior in a competitive electricity market. Two techniques are developed based on different models of the price-setting process in a competitive electricity...