States and school districts across the United States are increasingly using value-added models (VAMs) to evaluate teachers. In practice, VAMs typically rely on lagged test scores from the previous academic year, which necessarily conflate summer learning with school-year gains. These...

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers' careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learningby- Doing (LBD) and...

In this paper we provide an analytical review of previous estimates of the rate of return on schooling investments and measure how these estimates vary by country, over time, and by estimation method. We find evidence of reporting (or "file drawer") bias in the estimates and, after due account...

A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions - small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial...

A recent critique of using teachers' test score value-added (TVA) is that teacher quality is multifaceted; some teachers are effective in raising test scores, others are effective in improving long-term outcomes This paper exploits an institutional setting where high school teachers are randomly...

Politicians typically focus on short-term economic issues; but, a nation’s long-term economic well-being is directly linked to its rate of economic growth. In turn, its growth rate is directly linked to the economically relevant skills of its population. Until recently, however, economists...