Many urban school districts in the United States and OECD countries confront the necessity of closing schools due to declining enrollments. To address this important policy question, we formulate a sequential game where a superintendent is tasked with closing down a certain percentage of student...

Research over the past several years has led to development of models characterizing equilibrium in a system of local jurisdictions. An important insight from these models is that plausible single-crossing assumptions about preferences generate strong predictions about the equilibrium...

We review the theoretical, computational, and empirical research on school vouchers, with a focus on the latter. In this substantial body of work, many studies find insignificant effects of vouchers on educational outcomes; however, multiple positive findings support continued exploration....

For decades, colleges and universities have struggled to increase participation of minority and disadvantaged students. Urban school districts confront a parallel challenge; minority and disadvantaged students are underrepresented in selective programs that use merit-based admission. In their...

Extending research on organizational learning to multi-product environments is of particular importance given that the vast majority of products are manufactured in such environments. We investigate learning in a multi-product facility drawing on exceptionally rich data for a manufacturing firm...

In light of the extensive theoretical evidence suggesting absence of equilibrium in voting models, Tullock (1981) asks "Why So Much Stability?" Our results suggest the following answer: Political agents engaged in long-term relationships can sustain highly stable allocations if there are...

This paper examines whether gifted programs can help urban districts retain students. Gifted programs often IQ thresholds for admission, which creates strong incentives to manipulate the IQ score of students to increase access to the program. In the presence of local manipulation, the standard...

A central challenge in estimating models with heterogeneous housing is separating quality from price. We provide a new method for estimating hedonic functions for rental rates and housing values treating housing quality as unobserved by the econo- metrician. Our method also deals with the...