The last two decades witnessed a dramatic transformation of how central banks operate. An increasing number of central banks now use inflation targeting as their monetary policy control mechanism. A series of papers attempt to measure the effectiveness of inflation targeting on economic...

Using the National Educational Longitudinal Study data, we examine the role of pre-market abilities, as well as other determinants, on young men’s self-employment decision. Our results indicate that cognitive and noncognitive abilities are two important, in opposing directions, predictors of...

Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects...

The role of right-to-work laws on state economies, labor organizations and employees are controversial and important policy questions. Empirical evidence is far from being conclusive predominantly due to identification issues. Using a recently developed econometric technique and exploiting the...

This paper examines the role of holding a leadership position in high school on adult earnings and assesses the sensitivity of the previously found positive association to nonrandom selection bias. Using a recently developed procedure, we show that a substantial part of this relation is causal....

Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we look at the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we find that TFA teachers neither help...

We examine the effect of peer achievement on students' own achievement and teacher performance in primary schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods using data from a well-executed randomized experiment in seven states. Contrary to the existing literature, we find that the average classroom peer...