School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

Child laborï¾’s effect on academic achievement is estimated, using unique data on 3rd and 4th graders in 9 Latin American countries. Cross-country variation in truancy regulations provides an exogenous shift in the ages of children normally in these grades, providing exogenous variation in...

This paper reviews the issues surrounding the derivation of estimates of the impact of child labor on school outcomes. The paper aims to review the current state of methodological and empirical knowledge concerning the impact of child labor on learning, to review existing data sets that could be...

Universities spend almost $2 billion subsidizing their collegiate sports programs.  Even the most popular women’s sport, basketball, fails to break even. An application of Becker’s theory of customer discrimination is used to calculate the relative preference for men’s...

This report presents an overview of social entrepreneurship activities of public university graduates obtained from a survey. Almost 3 percent of respondents had created at least one nonprofit organization. The primary focus of the organizations founded by social entrepreneur respondents was...

  This paper examines the roles of specialized versus general skills in explaining variation in the returns to an agriculture degree across majors inside and outside the agricultural industry. The focus on returns by sector of employment is motivated by the finding that most agricultural majors...

The philosophy of fiscal federalism presumes that local communities will under- or over-provide public amenities in the presence of externalities.  We test this hypothesis using data from Vision Iowa, a state program which provided partial funding to communities to build tourist attractions. ...

We study the importance of sunk costs in determining entry conditions and inferences about firm conduct in an adapted Bresnahan and Reiss (1991, 1994) framework. In our framework, entrants incur sunk costs to enter, while incumbents disregard these costs in deciding on continuation or exit. We...