This paper provides the first causal evidence on the impact of college advisor quality on student outcomes. To do so, we exploit a unique setting where students are randomly assigned to faculty advisors during their first year of college. We find that higher advisor value-added (VA)...

Information about teachers' effectiveness at the hiring stage is particularly scarce despite its importance for personnel decisions. Using the German setting of teacher training, I investigate the relationship of teachers' pre-service cognitive and pedagogical skills as measured by two state...

This working paper investigates how empirical Bayes shrinkage, an approach commonly used in implementing teacher accountability systems, affects the value-added estimates of teachers of students with hard-to-predict achievement levels, such as students who have low prior achievement and receive...

This working paper uses urban school district data to investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks. Accounting for two...

This working paper uses urban school district data to investigate whether including track indicators or accounting for classroom characteristics in the value-added model is sufficient to eliminate potential bias resulting from the sorting of students into academic tracks. Accounting for two...

This working paper investigates how empirical Bayes shrinkage, an approach commonly used in implementing teacher accountability systems, affects the value-added estimates of teachers of students with hard-to-predict achievement levels, such as students who have low prior achievement and receive...