This paper provides new information about the interrelated issues of teacher turnover (both within and across school districts and inside and outside of teaching) and the importance of nonpecuniary school characteristics, such as race and poverty, using new administrative data on Georgia...

While substantial recent attention has been paid to understanding the determinants of educational outcomes, little is known about the causal impact of the most fundamental input in the education production function - students’ study effort. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of...

This paper makes three contributions to the literature on program evaluation. First, we construct a model that is well-suited to conduct equilibrium policy experiments and we illustrate effectiveness of general equilibrium models as tools for the evaluation of social programs. Second, we...

This paper examines whether local labor market conditions at the time of high school graduation have long-term effects on wages. We find that a higher unemployment rate raises the probability of staying in school after finishing high school of white males, but reduces that of black males. A...

This paper presents and estimates a unified model where both human capital investment and job search are endogenized. This unification enables us to quantify the relative contributions of each mechanism to life cycle earnings growth, while investigating potential interactions between human...

Effective tax and subsidy rates (ETRs and ESRs) on human capital investment via postsecondary education are estimated for Canada in the years 2000 and 2006. The flattening of the federal personal income tax structure in 2001 substantially reduced the tax disincentive for investment in human...

Measures of occupation distance based on underlying skill portfolios are constructed and used to contrast involuntary and total mobility. One component of total occupational mobility is voluntary mobility, including moves to higher job offers using the same skills, as well as promotions that may...

Despite an increased awareness of the policy importance of understanding the determinants of education outcomes, knowledge of the relationship between education outcomes and perhaps the most basic input in the education production process -- students' study time and effort -- has remained...

The estimation of production functions suffers from an unresolved identification problem caused by flexible inputs, such as intermediate inputs. We develop an identification strategy for production functions based on a transformation of the firm’s short-run first order condition that solves...

Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by...