We analyze all but a few of the 47 charter schools operating in New York City in 2005-06. The schools tend locate in disadvantaged neighborhoods and serve students who are substantially poorer than the average public school student in New York City. The schools also attract black applicants to...

Although state and federal governments heavily subsidize the price of college, estimates of the impact of these subsidies on college enrollment have not been well-identified. I use a regression discontinuity design to study the impact of the CalGrant program in California on college going....

This paper offers a thesis as to why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per-capita GDP, as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth where human capital is the "engine of growth". The conjecture is that the ascendancy of the US...

This essay is the companion piece to about 550 individual data series on education to be included in the updated Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition (Cambridge University Press 2000, forthcoming). The essay reviews the broad outlines of U.S. educational history from...

We study a society with a continuum of families, segregated in neighborhoods perfectly by income. There is a deterministic, non-linear relationship between years of education attained in youth and earnings in adult life.

Several recent papers on the political economy of growth have argued that increased skewness in the distribution of wealth/income induces slower growth. In the present model, investment, viewed as education, comes from two sources : a public component, financed by taxes and equally distributed...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

In this paper, we illustrate a methodology to measure discrimination in educational contexts. In India, we ran an exam competition through which children compete for a large financial prize. We recruited teachers to grade the exams. We then randomly assigned child "characteristics" (age, gender,...

Akerlof and Kranton (2002) model the effects of student identity on achievement. They argue that students have identities that determine the effort expended on learning. Academic achievement within a school depends on the match between student identities and academic and disciplinary standards....

Over the period 1995–1998 Italy experienced an expansion of its higher education supply with the aim of reducing regional differences in educational attainment. This paper evaluates the effects of this policy by combining differences across provinces in the number of campuses constructed with...