This is a collection of essays written for the Financial Express, an Indian financial daily. The common themes of these essays, which cover a period of almost four years, from August 2010 to June 2014, are issues of growth and innovation in India, considered in two sequential parts, each part...

There is no clear theoretical prediction regarding whether home computers are an important input in the educational production function. To investigate the hypothesis that access to a home computer affects educational outcomes, we conduct the first-ever field experiment involving the provision...

College GPAs in the United States rose substantially between the 1960’s and the 2000’s. Over the same period, study time declined by almost a half. This paper uses a 12-quarter panel of course evaluations from the University of California, San Diego to discern whether a link...

Using a recently released confidential dataset from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we find some evidence of "white flight" from public schools into private schools partly in response to minority schoolchildren. We also examine whether "white flight" is from all minorities...

Approximately 9 out of 10 high school students who have access to a home computer use that computer to complete school assignments. Do these home computers, however, improve educational outcomes? Using the Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the 2001 Current Population Survey, I explore...

A growing literature examines the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurship, but no previous studies explore whether personality or psychological traits predispose individuals to benefit more from entrepreneurship training. To address selection issues, we use novel data from...

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes especially wage,...

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership...

Access to information may represent an important barrier to learning about and ultimately transferring to 4-year colleges for low-income community college students.  This paper explores the role that access to information technology, in particular, plays in enhancing, or possibly detracting...

The paper tests whether native-born American families respond to inflows of immigrants by sending their children to private school.  The analysis uses 1980 and 1990 Census data from 132 metropolitan areas.  For primary school students, no significant relation between immigration and...