Analyses of income inequality have identified the importance of increased demand for worker skills, but characterizations of worker skills by the amount of schooling attained do not capture important aspects of the widening income distribution and of the stagnating relative wages of black...

In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student...

The role of schooling and school quality in the economy has become very confused, in part because of attempts to argue different positions on educational policy. Research demonstrates that school quality has a strong impact on individual earnings, on the distribution of income, and on overall...

An important element in considering school finance policies is that households are not passive. Instead they respond to policies with a combination of modified residential choice and political choice of tax levels. The highly stylized decision models of most existing analyses, however, lead to...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

The leading school reform policy in the United States revolves around strong accountability of schools with consequences for performance. The federal government's involvement through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 reinforces the prior movement of many states toward policies based on...

Today, no economist studying the spatial economy of urban areas would ignore the effects of race on housing markets and labor market opportunities, but this was not always the case. Through what can be seen as a consistent and integrated research plan, John Kain developed many central ideas of...

Historically, most attention in public programs has been given to the resources devoted to the activity, and resources have been used to index both commitment and quality. Education differs from other areas of public expenditure because direct measures of outcomes are available, making it is...

School quality and grade completion by students are shown to be directly linked, leading to very different perspectives on educational policy in developing countries. Unique panel data on primary school age children in Egypt permit estimation of behavioral models of school leaving. Students...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...