Banking reforms--that reduced interest rates--boosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class families. We define "able" students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We define "middle class" as families in which both parents...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

We study the effects of private school competition on public school students' test scores in the wake of Florida's Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship program, now known as the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which offered scholarships to eligible low-income students to attend private...

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show...

Using a panel of U.S. school districts spanning 1970 - 2000, we examine the relationship between income inequality and fiscal support for public education. In contrast with recent theoretical and empirical work suggesting a negative relationship between inequality and public spending, we find...

This paper evaluates the first year of Harvard's Financial Aid Initiative, which increased aid and recruiting for students from low income backgrounds. Using rich data from the Census and administrative sources, we estimate family incomes for the vast major of plausible applicants from the U.S....

This paper examines the education literature through the lens of sorting. It argues that how individuals sort across neighborhoods, schools and households (spouses), can have important consequences for the acquisition of human capital and inequality. It discusses the implications of different...

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This paper focuses on the sensitivity of value-added to test-score-ceiling effects. Test-score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across...

When there are peer effects in education, private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students. Epple and Romano (1998) develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present. The...