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...

In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that separate schools for black and white children were 'inherently unequal.' This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years in fact benefited the black students for whom the plans were designed. Analysis of data from...

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources - the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to the...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960's and early 1970's that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and...

We show that the week after selling a large-prize Texas Lotto winning ticket, a retailer experiences a 12 to 38 percent relative increase in ticket sales. Some increase persists for up to 40 weeks. We document that the sales response increases with jackpot size and is larger in areas with more...

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980’s, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources – the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to...