Although school accountability incentives and standards, such as district-mandated goals and state sanctions for poor performance, are increasingly common, few studies have investigated their effectiveness. The author of this paper seeks evidence on whether such policies affect public secondary...

We disaggregate the self-employed into incorporated and unincorporated to distinguish between “entrepreneurs” and other business owners. The incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncognitive, and family traits. Besides coming from higher-income families with...

The renewed focus on the importance of human capital for social development and economic growth, and the recently published evidence on wide international disparities in student achievements, have led to a new interest in the determinants of schooling quality. This paper evaluates the effect on...

Proposals to use teachers' performance incentives as the basis for school reforms have recently attracted considerable attention and support among researchers and policy makers. The main message is that the most likely way to improve students' achievements is to institute performance incentives,...

In organizations, teams are ubiquitous. 'Weakest Link' and 'Best Shot' are incentive schemes that tie a group member’s compensation to the output of their group’s least and most productive member, respectively. In this paper, we test the impact of these incentive schemes by conducting two...

We model the joint distribution of (i) individual education trajectories, defined by the allocation of time (semesters) between various combinations of school enrollment with different labor supply modalities and periods of school interruption devoted either to employment or home production and...

This paper utilizes the Soviet Interview Project (SIP) and the 1990 U.S. census to identify and to track a sample of Soviet emigres. After examining basic descriptive statistics on income mobility, we specify and estimate earnings functions to examine the impact of a variety of explanatory...

This article in the Economic Insights series examines two questions: (1) Which groups of Canadian workers have experienced stronger real wage growth over the past three decades?; and (2) To what extent do individuals' acquisition of education, general work experience, and seniority within firms,...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to financial incentives and, in particular, it is an attempt to identify the causal impact of a wage loss on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector. Specifically, we exploit the unexpected wage cut in May 2010 that affected all...

This paper examines whether more informative job promotions carry larger wage increases. In job assignment models with asymmetric information, unexpected promotions send a signal to the external labor market to revise upward their assessment of a worker's ability. The employing firm must then...