The Department of Justice's (DOJ's) investigation of private colleges for price-fixing caused the Overlap' group of colleges to discontinue their meetings. DOJ alleged that the meetings enabled the colleges to collude on higher tuition and increase their tuition revenue. The colleges claimed...

We show how to construct a ranking of U.S. undergraduate programs based on students' revealed preferences. We construct examples of national and regional rankings, using hand-collected data on 3,240 high- achieving students. Our statistical model extends models used for ranking players in...

School finance schemes control the allocation of $370 billion a year in the United States, but their economics are poorly understood. We examine an illuminating example: Texas' Robin Hood' scheme, which was enacted in 1994, allocates about $30 billion a year, and is currently collapsing and...

Public school finance equalization programs can be characterized by the change they impose on the tax price of an additional dollar of local school spending. I calculate the tax price of spending for each school district in the United States for 1972, 1982, and 1992. I find that using the actual...

We investigate how university governance affects research output, measured by patenting and international university research rankings. For both European and U.S. universities, we generate several measures of autonomy, governance, and competition for research funding. We show that university...

Arguments in favor of school choice depend on the idea that competition between schools improves the quality of education. However, we have almost no empirical evidence on whether competition actually affects school quality. In this study, I examine the effects of inter-school competition on...

I use natural population variation to identify the effects of class size and composition on student achievement. I isolate the credibly random component of population variation in each grade and school district and use this component to generate instrumental variables for class size and...

Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics. I identify the effects of peers whom a...

Many school choice proposals would enable parents to choose among public school districts in their area, though not among private schools. Theory predicts three reactions to easier choice among public schools: increased sorting of students and parents among schools; easier choice will encourage...