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...

"Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for the fact that households will respond to changes in school inputs. We present a dynamic household optimization model relating test scores to school and household inputs, and test its...

Analyses of income inequality have identified the importance of increased demand for worker skills, but characterizations of worker skills by the amount of schooling attained do not capture important aspects of the widening income distribution and of the stagnating relative wages of black...

Proprietary data for production workeis is analyzed to determine which aspects of productivity are affected by secondary schooling. The measures of productivity explored are: propensity to quit and be absent, phisical oatput per hour, and ability to perform complex tasks. The data suggests that...

In this paper, we will investigate the effect of six factors on occupational earnings inequality across all occupations in our sample and across occupations in five major Census subgroups. Those six factors are: differences in tasks, different levels of efficiency, institutional factors, time...

Inequality in income or earnings is the most indisputable fact about the distribution of income. Inequality in income distribution occurs in most political and economic models and has from ancient times to the modern era. Society and government have expressed a desire to establish a minimum...

We analyze in this paper the long term effect of a high school remedial education program, almost two decades after its implementation. We combine high school records with National Social Security administrative data to examine longer-term outcomes when students were in their early 30s. Our...

Understanding inequality and devising policies to alleviate it was a central focus of Jan Tinbergen's lifetime research. He was far ahead of his time in many aspects of his work. This essay places his work in the perspective of research on inequality in his time and now, focusing on his studies...

Randomized controlled trials in lower-income countries have demonstrated ways to increase learning, in specific settings. This study uses a large-scale, nationwide RCT in Ghana to show the external validity of four school-based interventions inspired by other RCTs. Even though the government...

The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school...