A significant literature in demography and demographic history documents clear relationships between the supply of men with stable earnings and marriage rates among women. Wilson (1987) reasons that because single motherhood is an alternative to traditional marriage, circumstances that impede...

The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal for principals and teachers. Further, the...

Many studies document a clear relationship between the supply of marriageable men and marriage rates, but few studies find that the supply of marriageable men affects the number of women who choose to be single mothers. The model presented here addresses this puzzle. Many women view either...

We propose an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions our scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students....

Several empirical regularities motivate most theories of the distribution of labor earnings. Earnings distributions tend to be skewed to the right and display long right tails. Mean earnings always exceed median earnings and the top percentiles of earners account for quite a disproportionate...

This paper uses supervision data from a supplement to the 1977 wave of the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics to examine differences in supervision and wages across industries and to evaluate relationships between supervision practices and interindustry wage differentials. The results demonstrate...

Taken as a whole, the literature on black-white wage inequality suggests that racial gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women, and further that one can accurately assess black-white gaps in potential wages among women without accounting for black-white differences in patterns...

The model of job search involves both employer matches and career matches. Workers may change employers without changing careers but cannot search over possible lines of work while working for one employer. The optimal policy implies a two-stage search strategy in which workers search over types...

Education officials often use one assessment system both to create measures of student achievement and to create performance metrics for educators. However, modern standardized testing systems are not designed to produce performance metrics for teachers or principals. They are designed to...