Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large...

A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study...

With few exceptions, empirical research investigating the possibility of heterogeneous benefits of class size reduction lacks a conceptual framework about specific dimensions of potential heterogeneity. In this paper we develop a model of education production that incorporates disruption and...

Sizeable achievement differences by race appear in early grades, but substantial uncertainty exists about the impact of school quality on the black-white achievement gap and particularly about its evolution across different parts of the achievement distribution. Texas administrative data show...

This paper models and tests the implications of costly enforcement of property rights on the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI). We posit that domestic agents have a comparative advantage over foreign agents in overcoming some of the obstacles associated with corruption and weak...

Important policy decisions rest on the relationship between teacher salaries and the quality of teachers, but the evidence about the strength of any such relationship is thin. This paper relies upon the matched panel data of the UTD Texas School Project to investigate how shifts in salary...

Consider a multi-sector economy subject to an exogenous demand shock that alters the equilibrium structure of relative prices. How should the structure of sectorial wages adjust in response to such a shock? This question is addressed in the context of a multi-sector model of an open-economy...

This paper investigates an economy in which there are short-term wage contracts that are re-negotiated under certain conditions. This paper determines the optimal frequency of wage re-negotiation and shows that it depends positively on measures of aggregate variability and Phillips curve slope....

Optimal wage indexation, as derived by Gray, was subject to criticism due to a lack of efficient use of information; failure to clear the market which resulted in non-optimal contracts; and the lack of an explicit use of welfare criteria. The purpose of this paper is to derive a wage contract...

This paper analyzes the degree of short-run, real wage flexibility in a two-sector economy under floating rates. This is done by deriving optimal wage indexation in a contracting framework. We find that the more closed the economy, the lower the degree of wage indexation. As a result, output...