In recent decades, the US wage structure has been transformed by a rising college premium, a narrowing gender gap, and increasing persistent and transitory residual wage dispersion. This paper explores the implications of these changes for cross-sectional inequality in hours worked, earnings and...

We investigate the determinants of educational quality in a panel data set that includes" output and input measures for a broad number of countries. The results show that family inputs" and school resources are closely related to school outcomes, as measured by internationally" comparable test...

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This paper focuses on the sensitivity of value-added to test-score-ceiling effects. Test-score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across...

Colombia's PACES program provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers that covered half the cost of private secondary school. The vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress. Since many vouchers were assigned by lottery, program effects can reliably be...

Although recent evidence suggests that non-cognitive skills such as engagement matter for academic and economic success, there is little evidence on how key educational inputs affect the development of these skills. We present a re-analysis of follow-up data from the Project STAR class-size...

This paper examines the relative benefits of general education and vocational training in Romania, a country which experienced major technological and institutional change during its transition from Communism to a market economy. To avoid the bias caused by non-random selection, we exploit a...

This paper examines an empirical regularity found in many societies: that family influences on the probability of transiting from one grade level to the next diminish at higher levels of education. We examine the statistical model used to establish the empirical regularity and the intuitive...

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sibling sex composition and educational achievement. First, I replicate the study of Butcher and Case (1994) using data on a more recent birth cohort. Contrary to the findings of that study, I find basically no effect of sibling sex composition...

Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008a, b) shows that typical value added models indicate large counter-factual effects of 5th grade teachers on students' 4th grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments...

We develop a model of optimal schooling investments and estimate it using new data on approximately 700 identical twins. We estimate an average return to schooling of 9 percent for identical twins, but estimated returns appear to be slightly higher for less able individuals. Simple cross-section...