The charging of school user fees is a much-debated policy issue in developing countries. In this paper, I evaluate the impact of a South African fee elimination program that was targeted at the poorest two quintiles of schools based on a community poverty score. Fixed effects estimates find that...

We consider the desirability of modifying a standard Taylor rule for a cen- tral bank's interest-rate policy to incorporate either an adjustment for changes in interest-rate spreads (as proposed by Taylor, 2008, and by McCulley and Toloui, 2008) or a response to variations in the aggregate...

Motivated by high and rising sex ratios in countries such as India and China, we formulate a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of economic development on parental sex choice when sons are culturally prized and children provide old age support. Two key assumptions drive our model....

In current debates regarding the future of education, teacher compensation schemes are often criticized for their lack of performance-based pay. Proponents of merit pay for teachers argue that tying teacher salaries to student achievement will induce teachers to focus on the success of their...

Income shocks appear to be the main shocks that precipitate homelessness. Rent shocks are less important.

The Boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice pro- cedures in use. Yet, the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances, which led the Boston Public Schools to recently replace it with Gale and Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm (henceforth,...