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...

Online review aggregators, such as TripAdvisor, HotelClub and OpenTable help consumers identify the products and services that best match their preferences. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of online review aggregators on firms and consumers. We adopt Salop's circular city...

This paper follows a cohort of initially high-performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines whether attending a low-achieving school impacts their subsequent standardized exam scores, as well as the grade in which they first take Algebra I. Two key findings emerge....

This paper follows a cohort of initially high performing Missouri students from grade-3 through grade-9 and examines which school factors influence their academic success. Three key findings emerge. First, in terms of performance on standardized tests, schools that are effective in promoting...

We analyze a duopoly game in which products are initially differentiated in variety and quality. Each consumer has a most preferred variety and a quality valuation. Customization provides ideal varieties but has no effect on product qualities. The firms first choose whether to customize their...