For the purpose of understanding the underlying mechanisms behind intergenerational associations in income and education, recent studies have explored the intergenerational transmission of abilities. We use a large representative sample of Swedish men to examine both intergenerational and...

Behrman and Rosenzweig (2002) used data on a small sample of MZ (monozygotic, identical) twin parents and their children to show that father's schooling is more important than mother's schooling for children's schooling in the U.S. Recent studies based on much larger samples of twins from...

Behrman and Rosenzweig (2002) used data on a small sample of MZ (monozygotic, identical) twin parents and their children to show that father's schooling is more important than mother's schooling for children's schooling in the U.S. Recent studies based on much larger samples of twins from...

For the purpose of understanding the underlying mechanisms behind intergenerational associations in income and education, recent studies have explored the intergenerational transmission of abilities. We use a large representative sample of Swedish men to examine both intergenerational and...

Can students' rank in the ability distribution of their class impact their academic achievement? We aim to answer this question using a discontinuity generated by a rule for the distribution of students between classes at a prestigious Brazilian university. The rule means that in almost 30 per...

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,...

There is a rich history of using data from twins and from adoptees to control for genetic influences and thereby examine the impact of environment on children's outcomes. The behavioral genetics model is the workhorse of this literature and for a variety of outcomes including IQ scores and...

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...