Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior. Math scores of students in more-affected schools rose by 0.05...

Historically, most attention in public programs has been given to the resources devoted to the activity, and resources have been used to index both commitment and quality. Education differs from other areas of public expenditure because direct measures of outcomes are available, making it is...

Two of the most important reforms to American public schooling this century have been an increase in the minimum school-leaving age and a dramatic increase in expenditures per pupil. The first reform is generally acknowledged to have increased students' earnings later in life, while the second...

Using math and reading test score gains, the author compares the achievement of students in the nonsectarian private schools participating in Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program with the achievement of students in a wide range of Milwaukee's public schools. Her results point to the need for a...

This paper attempts to reconcile the contradictory findings in the debate over school resources and school effectiveness by highlighting the role of aggregation in the presence of omitted variables bias. While data aggregation for well- specified linear models yields unbiased parameter...

This paper investigates the long-term effects of local government education spending on child outcomes, including income, educational attainment, and family formation in adulthood. We propose a novel identification strategy which exploits quasirandom variation in demographic trends when there is...

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian Government constructed over 61,000 primary schools throughout the country. This is one of the largest school construction programs on record. I evaluate the effect of this program on education and wages by combining differences across regions in the number...

We study the dynamics of the quantity and quality of teachers in the framework of dynamic general equilibrium OLG model. The quantity and quality are jointly set by a government agency wishing to maximize the quality of basic education per student while being bound by teachers’ collective...