Every year, thousands of high school seniors with high college aptitude face complicated menus' of scholarship and aid packages designed to affect their college choices. Using an original survey designed for this paper, we investigate whether students respond to their menus' like rational human...

This paper presents theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrating the ways in which" the changing market structure of American higher education from 1940 to the present affected" college prices and college quality. Over this period, the market for baccalaureate education" became significantly...

We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we...

I construct an agency model of local public goods producers with special reference to public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers'...

Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or...

This paper investigates whether schools that face stronger choice-based incentives have greater demand for certain teacher characteristics and (if so) which teacher characteristics. Schools that face choice-based incentives should demand teachers who raise a schools' ability to attract students....

This paper examines the validity of overidentification tests and exogeneity tests in the presence of grouped data. We find that even a small intra-group correlation, when instruments do not vary within groups, may generate a substantial bias in the standard overidentification tests described in...

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that...

We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and...