I estimate the aggregate income elasticity of Wal-Mart's and Target's revenues using quarterly data for 1997-2006. I find that Wal-Mart's revenues increase during bad times, whereas Target's revenues decrease, consistent with Wal-Mart selling "inferior goods" in the technical sense of the term....

It is widely known that standardized tests are noisy measures of student learning, but value added models (VAMs) rarely take direct account of measurement error in student test scores. We examine the extent to which modifying VAMs to include information about test measurement error (TME) can...

We use data from one of the few states where information on curriculum adoptions is available – Indiana – to empirically evaluate differences in performance across three elementary-mathematics curricula. The three curricula that we evaluate were popular nationally during the time...

How does public access to criminal records affect crime? Economic theory suggests that expanding access to criminal information may increase the cost of crime to potential criminals by endangering their future work prospects and thus act as a deterrent. However, increased provision of...

Conditional on enrollment, African American entrants at 4-year public universities are much less likely to graduate, and graduate in STEM fields, than white entrants. Using administrative micro data from Missouri, we show that the success gaps between African-American and white students in...

We use data on workers in the largest public-sector occupation in the United States – teaching – to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention. Specifically, we study a 1999 enhancement to the pension formula for public school teachers in St. Louis that...

In its favor, the common Kolmogorov–Smirnov test: 1) is distribution-free and non- parametric, 2) provides uniform confidence bands for the CDF by inversion, 3) may be interpreted as a family of pointwise tests controlling the familywise error rate, 4) can be calibrated to have exact...

Using and extending fractional order statistic theory, we characterize the O(n−1) coverage probability error of the previously proposed confidence intervals for population quantiles using L-statistics as endpoints in Hutson (1999). We derive an analytic expression for the n−1 term,...

We provide novel methods for inference on quantile treatment effects in both uncon- ditional and conditional (nonparametric) settings. These methods achieve high-order accuracy by using the probability integral transform and a Dirichlet (rather than Gaus- sian) reference distribution. We propose...

We examine the efficiency implications of imposing proportionality in teacher evaluation systems. Proportional evaluations force comparisons to be between equally-circumstanced teachers. We contrast proportional evaluations with global evaluations, which compare teachers to each other regardless...