In the canonical regression discontinuity (RD) design for applicants who face an award or admissions cutoff, causal effects are nonparametrically identified for those near the cutoff. The effect of treatment on inframarginal applicants is also of interest, but identification of such effects...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker, for many asymmetric information environments. The presence of an...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker, for many asymmetric information environments. The presence of an...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation’s statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker across common asymmetric information environments. I develop the...

Each discipline has its own framing and conventions. Economics emphasises the identification of key variables and relationships and their estimation using quantitative research methods, with common reliance on econometrics. The approaches shape what is observed and any resulting policy...

The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more...

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academic outcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effort if school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that empirical estimates of the "total" effect of changes in school quality could be quite...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

This selection of E.G. West's papers contains a wealth of economic and philosophical analysis which can guide policymakers in the field of education. The papers show how state monopoly provision of education has led to a particular model of schooling which does not work for many of those who use...