This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness is associated with a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using: (i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries. The time structure...

We estimate the effect of class size on student performance in 11 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Conventional estimates of class-size effects are shown to be...

This paper develops empirical growth models suitable for dual economies, and studies the relationship between structural change and economic growth. Changes in the structure of employment will raise aggregate productivity when the marginal product of labor varies across sectors. The models in...

Using monthly post-1995 Japanese data we propose a new sign-restriction based approach to identify monetary policy shocks when the economy is at the zero-lower bound (ZLB). The identifying restrictions are thoroughly grounded in liquidity trap theory. Our results show that a quantitative easing...

We study a fundamental conflict in economic decision-making, the trade-off between equality, equity and incentives, in a new experimental game that nests a voluntary contributions mechanism in a broader spectrum of incentive schemes. In a 2×2 design, we let subjects either vote on or...

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian...

Both theory and empirical evidence suggest that there is a lifecycle of educational finance in which the returns to educational investments tend to decrease with age. Returns tend to be highest for disadvantaged children in the early stages and for those who have already acquired high-quality...