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...

In 2007, Michigan began requiring all high school students to take the ACT college entrance exam. This natural experiment allows us to evaluate the performance of several parametric and semiparametric sample selection correction models. We apply each model to the censored, prepolicy test score...

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we offer some of the first causal estimates of the earnings gains to for-profit colleges. We rely on restricted-use data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97)...

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a...

The study here analyzes, across European countries, the relationship between labour and drivers of technological innovation, also considering the interaction of these variables with the structural indicator of the public debt. The main findings are: the fruitful effect of total public...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a structural, dynamic model of schooling decisions using data extracted from the Canadian Youth in Transition Survey (YITS). The model incorporates forward-looking behavior and expectations about future benefits from investing in education. The results...

A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children's initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identification...

This paper estimates the effects of extending the school day during elementary school on students' education outcomes later in life. We do so in the context of Mexico City's metropolitan area, where a large-scale program introduced in 2007 extended the school day from 4.5 to 8 hours in schools...

Absences in Chicago Public High Schools are 3-7 days per year higher in first period than at other times of the day. This study exploits this empirical regularity and the essentially random variation between students in the ordering of classes over the day to measure how the returns to classroom...

We study the effect of standardized external tests on students’ academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 and apply a difference-in-difference methodology using outcomes of the PISA...