Any system of primary and secondary schools involves explicit or implicit mechanisms that ration not only financial but also nonfinancial inputs into education production. This chapter focuses primarily on such mechanisms as they relate to the sorting of parents and children into schools and...

Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study, (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. The thousands of studies that have applied human capital theory to the first two...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of research on neighborhoods and social networks and their role in shaping behavior and economic outcomes. We include a discussion of empirical and theoretical analyses of the role of neighborhoods and social networks in crime, education, and labor-market...

This Chapter summarizes the overall facts about charitable giving. Charitable giving has remained an active and important area within Public Economics. Then also discusses about the four main approaches one could take to research on charitable giving. The first approach is to look at giving as a...

We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on peer effects in education. Theoretical models of peer effects are first summarized. Models of educational provision regimes in which peer effects play a central role are then discussed. Next we discuss the identification issues in estimating...

Concern over the distributional effects of policies which induce changes in peer group structure, or associational redistributions (Durlauf, 1996c), motivates a substantial body of theoretical and empirical research in economics, sociology, psychology, and education. A growing collection of...

While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature social econometrics has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We consider...

This chapter summarizes the recent literature on peer effects in student outcomes at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. Linear-in-means models find modest sized and statistically significant peer effects in test scores. But the linear-in-means model masks considerable...

By introducing the notions of projects and shares, this paper studies a class of economic environments, the so-called project-allocation situations, in which society may profit from cooperation, i.e., by reallocating the initial shares of projects among agents. This paper mainly focuses on the...