The federal government's Race to the Top competition has promoted the adoption of test-based performance measures as a component of teacher evaluations throughout many states, but the validity of these measures has been controversial among researchers and widely contested by teachers' unions. A...

The education reform movement includes efforts to raise teacher quality through stricter certification and licensing provisions. Most US states now require public school teachers to pass a standardized test such as the Praxis. Although any barrier to entry is likely to raise wages in the...

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers' hours are largely chosen at the worker's discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in U.S. public schools over...

The typical measure used by researchers and school administrators to evaluate teachers is based on how the students' achievement increases after being exposed to the teacher, or based on the teacher's "value-added''. When teacher value-added is heterogeneous across her students, the typically...

This paper investigates how the precision and stability of a teacher's value-added estimate relates to the characteristics of the teacher's students. Using a large administrative data set and a variety of teacher value-added estimators, it finds that the stability over time of teacher...

Beyond some contracted minimum, salaried workers’ hours are largely chosen at the worker’s discretion and should respond to the strength of contract incentives. Accordingly, we consider the response of teacher hours to accountability and school choice laws introduced in U.S. public schools...

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. Using the largest available sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools, we explore student-level and school-level explanations for this...

In Japan, the government wins most of its tax cases against taxpayers. Why? We find, using statistical analysis, that judges who rule for taxpayers do not suffer in their future careers in general. If, however, the loser, whether tax office or payers, appeals and wins, the trial judge's future...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser - whether governemnt or taxpayer - appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

En los países en desarrollo, la distribución desigual de la calidad de los docentes es un problema que subyace a la distribución desigual de los logros educativos. Sin embargo, poco se sabe sobre cómo el mercado laboral genera este tipo de distribución. Para contribuir a este tipo de...