fiscal decentralisation the knowledge economy and school teachers wages in urban china abstractwe examine how fiscal decentralisation and progress towards the development of a knowledge intensive economy has affected teachers wages in china utilising panel data from 2001 to 2013 we find that fiscal decentralisation has a negative impact on teachers wages and that this effect is magnified through a deepening of the knowledge economy while the knowledge economy itself has no effect on teachers wages the findings suggest that incentives being offered to local administrators need to be revisited if china is convinced of the need to increase teacher quality in ways suited to the knowledge economy which it wishes to construct

women s work sibling competition and children s school performance this research offers an interpretation of the relationship between fertility child spacing family resources and market work by mothers and the subsequent cognitive skills of grade schoolers as reported by their teachers first an approach to fertility as the outcome of a deliberate choice process is developed and then empirical evidence from a small panel of u s households first interviewed in 1975 76 when they had preschool children is presented in a 1981 82 reinterview a supplementary project was that of obtaining teacher ratings of school performance of individual children large family size as measured by the number of siblings of given age and sex in the household during preschool years in 1975 76 has an important negative impact on the child s subsequent grade school performance boy siblings in nearby age ranges have the most negative impact on performance while teenage siblings of either sex have no systematic adverse effect parental resources as measured by income education child care time and a mother s reduced market time are associated with greater cognitive skills and can offset the apparent disadvantage of having siblings in nearby age intervals there appears to be a significant tradeoff between a market career and a home career for women women who have more children spaced over wider age intervals and who devote more time to child care and less to market work presumably get more benefits from their home career in the form of enhanced child development on the other hand full time market work i e hours in the labor market for pay is important for earnings growth of the mother mary corcoran greg duncan and michael ponza 1983 and family income has a favorable effect on school performance so the apparent choices facing women are more equivocal

teacher quality in educational production tracking decay and student achievement growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of u s students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize or fire bad ones the leading method for assessing teacher quality is value added modeling vam which decomposes students test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality implicit in the vam approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms in this paper i develop falsification tests for three widely used vam specifications based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students past achievement in da ta from north carolina each of the vams exclusion restrictions are dramatically viola ted in particular these models indicate large effects of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade t est score gains i also find that conventional measures of individual teachers value added fade out very quickly and are at best weakly related to long run effects i discuss implic ations for the use of vams as personnel tools

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

natural disasters and human capital accumulation the empirical literature on the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education is inconclusive model averaging methods in a framework of cross country and panel regressions show an extremely robust negative partial correlation between secondary school enrollment and natural disaster risk this result is driven exclusively by geologic disasters exposure to natural disaster risk is a robust determinant of differences in secondary school enrollment between countries but not necessarily within countries natural disasters human capital education school enrollment bayesian model averaging

competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects a theoretical and computational model with tax financed tuition free public schools and competitive tuition financed private schools is developed students differ by ability and income achievement depends on own ability and on peers abilities equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income in private schools high ability low income students receive tuition discounts while low ability high income students pay tuition premia tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting and benefit high ability students relative to low ability students

measuring the duration of unemployment spells an understanding of the duration of unemployment spells is important for at least two reasons first the length of time spent unemployed has a direct bearing on individual welfare few people would feel so threatened by unemployment if they were certain it would only last a few weeks second changes in the duration of unemployment spells are an important influence on the aggregate unemployment rate the persistence of high unemployment after a recession and well into recovery and expansion is a puzzle to many one that requires an appreciation of changes in the incidence and duration of unemployment if it is to be solved the research summarized in this paper derives a measure of the complete length of unemployment spells in canada and analyzes how it changes over the business cycle the cyclical movement of the average complete duration of unemployment contrasts sharply with that of the average incomplete duration which is regularly published by statistics canada the first section of the paper discusses these differences by highlighting aggregate developments during the last two recessions while the second section outlines the methodology used and some of the results of comparing the experience during the recession of the early 1990s with that during the early 1980s

the quality and distribution of teachers under the no child left behind act the heart of accountability under the no child left behind nclb act is an attempt to change the existing incentives in schools with the ultimate objective that all students meet a proficiency standard existing research indicates that nothing is more important to high achieve ment as having effective teachers implying that the impact of new incentives on teachers will be central to any consideration of the accountability statutes tracing the impacts of nclb on the stock and distribution of teachers is none theless a difficult and uncertain task the belief that the quality of teachers matters a great deal to the quality of education received by students has actually proven hard to substantiate and the reasons for this difficulty are key to assessing the impacts of no child left behind a substantial body of research going back to the coleman et al 1966 report has attempted to link commonly used measures of teacher quality such as experience degree level and state teacher certification to student outcomes surprisingly except for perhaps the first few years of classroom experience no robust connection has appeared for example hanushek and rivkin 2006 review various studies attempting to identify characteristics of effective teachers one

katrina s children evidence on the structure of peer effects from hurricane evacuees in 2005 hurricanes katrina and rita forced many children to relocate across the southeast while schools quickly enrolled evacuees receiving families worried about the impact of evacuees on non evacuee students data from houston and louisiana show that on average the influx of evacuees moderately reduced elementary math test scores in houston we reject linear in means models of peer effects and find evidence of a highly non linear but monotonic model student achievement improves with high ability and worsens with low ability peers moreover exposure to undisciplined evacuees increased native absenteeism and disciplinary problems supporting a bad apple model in behavior

the effect of evaluation on teacher performance observable teacher characteristics like graduate education and experience beyond the first few years are not typically correlated with increased productivity many researchers and policymakers have suggested that under these conditions the only way to adjust the teacher distribution for the better is to gather information on individual productivity through evaluation and then dismiss low performers this paper offers evidence that evaluation can shift the teacher effectiveness distribution through a different mechanism by improving teacher skill effort or both in ways that persist long run we study a sample of mid career math teachers in the cincinnati public schools cps who were assigned to evaluation in a manner that permits a quasi experimental analysis all teachers in our sample were evaluated by a year long classroom observation based program the treatment between 2003 2004 and 2009 2010 the timing of each teacher s specific evaluation year was determined years earlier by a district planning process to this setting we add measures of student achievement which were not part of the evaluation and use the within teacher over time variation to compare teacher performance before during and after their evaluation year we find that teachers are more productive during the school year when they are being evaluated but even more productive in the years after evaluation a student taught by a teacher after that teacher has been through the cincinnati evaluation will score about 10 percent of a standard deviation higher in math than a similar student taught by the same teacher before the teacher was evaluated under our identification strategy these estimates may be biased by patterns of student assignment that favor previously evaluated teachers or by preexisting positive

agency problems auditing and the theory of the firm some evidence agency problems auditing and the theory of the firm some evidenceauthor s ross l watts and jerold l zimmermansource journal of law and economics vol 26 no 3 oct 1983 pp 613 633published by the university of chicago pressstable url http www jstor org stable 725039accessed 29 06 2008 23 14

social spillovers in the classroom identification estimation and policy analysis i present a method to jointly estimate social spillovers in the classroom and the distributions of teacher and student effects this method is based on the covariance and higher order moments restrictions of the test scores requiring the random assignment of teachers and students to classrooms using the tennessee project star dataset i estimate sizeable spillovers in kindergarten classrooms and departures from normality of the teacher and student ability distributions the estimates also show that reducing class size has a positive effect on mean performance but it increases the inequality based on these estimates i perform several input neutral policy counterfactuals involving teachers and students assignment rules and changing the distribution of class sizes for the latter i derive an optimal class size distribution rule which increases mean test scores and reduces the overall variance

corruption fertility and human capital abstract we build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity child quality trade off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital by integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth corruption and fertility choices we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption

the effect of school choice on participants evidence from randomized lotteries school choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement to evaluate the impact on participants we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the chicago public schools compared to those students who lose lotteries students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions including peer achievement and attainment levels nonetheless we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures lottery winners do however experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures such as self reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates

the pre programme earnings dip and the determinants of participation in a social programme implications for simple programme evaluation strategies the key to estimating the impact of a programme is constructing the counterfactual outcome representing what would have happened in its absence this problem becomes more complicated when agents such as individuals firms or local governments self select into the programme rather than being exogenously assigned to it this paper uses data from a major social experiment to identify what would have happened to the earnings of self selected participants in a job training programme had they not participated in it we investigate the implications of these earnings patterns for the validity of widely used before after and difference in differences estimators

why do audits fail evidence from lincoln savings and loan this study describes and critiques the audit procedures applied to a set of material transactions from the lincoln savings and loan lsl audit failure auditor deposition testimony and audit working papers produced in the civil litigation against the auditors of lsl provide the basis for this analysis we propose alternative procedures based on information available to the auditors at the time of the audit that might have prevented the audit failure other research methods have provided only very limited evidence on the important question of why audits fail the following detailed analysis of lsl suggests potential reasons for audit failures particularly in cases involving management fraud this research also provides a starting point for future research to evaluate the

market and political regulatory perspectives on the recent accounting scandals not surprisingly the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting we do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or political regulatory processes operate independently and the events are recent and not well researched so untangling their separate effects is somewhat conjectural this paper offers conjectures on issues such as what caused the scandalous behavior why was there such a rash of accounting scandals at one time who killed arthur andersen the securities and exchange commission or the market did fraudulent accounting kill enron or just keep it alive for too long what is the social cost of financial reporting fraud does the united states in fact operate a principles based or a rules based accounting system was there market failure or was there regulatory failure or both was the sarbanes oxley act a political and regulatory overreaction does the united states follow an ineffective regulatory model

do dropouts drop out too soon wealth health and happiness from compulsory schooling abstract this paper uses compulsory schooling laws to evaluate high school dropout decisions the main empirical result is that lifetime wealth increases by about 15 with an extra year of compulsory schooling students compelled to stay in school are also less likely to report being in poor health unemployed and unhappy the main conclusion is that high school aversion alone is unlikely to explain why dropouts forgo substantial gains to lifetime wealth the results are more consistent with the possibility that adolescents ignore or heavily discount future consequences when deciding to drop out of school if teenagers are myopic making school compulsory or offering incentives to stay in school may help improve lifetime outcomes

school choice stratification and information on school performance lessons from chile in the early 1980s chile implemented a nationwide school choice system under which the government finances education via a flat per student sub sidy or voucher to the public or private school chosen by a family at present about 94 percent of all schools public religious and secular private are voucher funded more than half of urban schools are private and most of these operate as for profit institutions 1 since the early 1990s chile has also publicized information on school performance and increased per pupil expen diture substantially despite these and other reforms chile has found it challenging to improve students learning outcomes 2 hsieh and urquiola find that the country s rel ative performance in international tests did not change much between 1970 and 1999 3 its performance on the 2000 programme for international student assessment pisa is not only much lower than the oecd average but is similar to that of other latin american countries and low relative to countries with similar income per capita

the impact of charter school attendance on student performance abstract we employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in texas to study the impact of charter school attendance we control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts we find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years failure to account for this pattern may lead to potentially misleading estimates of the impact of charter attendance on student achievement students who remain in charters largely recover from the initial disruption within approximately 3 years and there is weak evidence that there may be overall gains from charter attendance within this period furthermore students who return to traditional public schools after just 1 or 2 years in a charter do not appear to suffer a lasting negative impact despite their poor average performance in their first year of charter attendance

worker absence and productivity evidence from teaching a significant amount of work time is lost each year due to worker absence but evidence on the productivity losses from absenteeism remains scant due to difficulties with identification we use uniquely detailed data on the timing duration and cause of absences among teachers to address many of the potential biases from the endogeneity of worker absence our analysis indicates that worker absences have large negative impacts the expected loss in daily productivity from employing a temporary substitute is on par with replacing a regular worker of average productivity with one at the 10th 20th percentile of productivity

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

mobility targeting and private school vouchers simulations are derived from a three district model of low middle and highincome school districts calibrated to new york data with housing stocks that vary within and across districts in this model it is demonstrated that school district targeted vouchers are similar in their impact to nontargeted vouchers but vastly different from vouchers targeted to low income households furthermore strong migration effects are shown to significantly improve the likely equity consequences of voucher programs jel 122 128 h73 persistent frustration with the perceived low quality of public education exacerbated by concerns over the inherently unequal levels of public school quality across school districts has caused policy makers courts and researchers to investigate modifications and alternatives to the current public school system one idea that has received increasing academic and public attention is that of private school vouchers with proponents arguing that the competitive pressures of voucher programs would cause improvements in the efficiency of the publicschool system while at the same time addressing equity concerns if vouchers can be targeted to low income households or low income school districts but aside from a few limited experiments in some u s cities our experience with vouchers in the united states remains virtually nonexistent this limits the amount of information researchers can derive from standard empirical analysis in that it forces them to rely on only current nonvoucher induced differences in competition despite important suggestive results such work may not anticipate all the impacts from a large scale policy such as the voucher policies currently under discussion at the same time theoretical models of school finance are also limited in that they often either focus on only one particular aspect of the general equilibrium school finance problem or they are too rich and complex to yield crisp predictions

choice competition and pupil achievement choice and competition in education have recently found growing support from both policy makers and academics yet evidence on the actual benefits of market orientated reforms is at best mixed moreover although the economic rationale for choice and competition is clear in existing work there is rarely an attempt to distinguish between the two concepts in this paper we study whether pupils in primary schools in england with a wider range of school choices achieve better academic outcomes than those whose choice is more limited and whether primary schools facing more competition perform better than those in a more monopolistic situation in simple least squares regression models we find little evidence of a link between choice and achievement but uncover a small positive association between competition and school performance yet this could be related to endogenous school location or pupil sorting in fact an instrumental variable strategy based on discontinuities generated by admissions district boundaries suggests that the performance gains from greater school competition are limited only when we restrict our attention to voluntary aided schools which have more freedom in managing their governance and admission practices do we find some evidence of a positive causal link between competition and pupil achievement jel i20 h70 r5

the impact of alternative grade configurations on student outcomes through middle and high school abstract we use statewide administrative data from florida to estimate the impact of attending public schools with different grade configurations on student achievement through grade 10 based on an instrumental variable estimation strategy we find that students moving from elementary to middle school suffer a sharp drop in student achievement in the transition year these achievement drops persist through grade 10 we also find that middle school entry increases student absences and is associated with higher grade 10 dropout rates transitions to high school in grade 9 cause a smaller one time drop in achievement but do not alter students performance trajectories

pension enhancements and the retention of public employees the authors use data from workers in the largest public sector occupation in the united states teaching to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention specifically they study

the academic and labor market returns of university professors this paper estimates the impact of college teaching on students academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from bocconi university italy matched with italian tax records the estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of compulsory courses we find that good teaching matters more for the labor market than for academic performance moreover the professors who are best at improving the academic achievement of their best students are also the ones who boost their earnings the most on the contrary for low ability students the academic and labor market returns of teachers are largely uncorrelated we also find that professors who are good at teaching high ability students are often not the best teachers for the least able ones these findings can be rationalized in a model where teaching is a multi dimensional activity with each dimension having differential returns on the students academic outcomes and labor market success

outsourcing education experimental evidence from liberia in 2016 the liberian government delegated management of 93 randomly selected public schools to private providers providers received us 50 per pupil on top of us 50 per pupil annual expenditure in control schools after one academic year students in outsourced schools scored 0 18 higher in english and mathematics we do not find heterogeneity in learning gains or enrollment by student characteristics but there is significant heterogeneity across providers while outsourcing appears to be a cost effective way to use new resources to improve test scores some providers engaged in unforeseen and potentially harmful behavior complicating any assessment of welfare gains

choice information and constrained options school transfers in a stratified educational system it is well known that family socioeconomic background influences childhood access to opportunities educational reforms that introduce new information about school quality may lead to increased ine

an approach to statistical inference in cross sectional models with security abnormal returns as dependent variable several recent event studies test hypotheses about the association between event related abnormal security returns and firm characteristics using a three step procedure first forecast model parameters are estimated usually parameters of a market model second prediction errors or residuals are computed over an event period third prediction errors are regressed cross sectionally on firm characteristics hypothesized to influence the impact of the event on share values results of these regressions are used to draw inferences about the relation between abnormal returns and firm characteristics researchers who employ three step procedures acknowledge that crosssectional ols regressions lead to valid inferences if the disturbances are iid normal in cross section see for example leftwich 1981 p 23 and lustgarten 1982 p 138 while sufficient assumptions to draw valid inferences from ols regressions are clear these assumptions are violated if there is cross correlation and cross sectional heteroscedasticity in the firm return processes from which the prediction errors are estimated assumptions about the processes generating these prediction

cross sectional dependence and problems in inference in market based accounting research this paper provides a framework and some empirical evidence to evaluate the seriousness of problems in inference that arise in stockreturn based studies when the data are cross sectionally dependent the study is motivated on the grounds that statistical procedures designed to address such problems are often infeasible and even when they can be implemented they sometimes introduce other more serious difficulties thus researchers have frequently adopted an approach that ignores the cross sectional dependence e g ordinary least squares ols the objective of this paper is to help identify the contexts in which ignoring the dependence would lead to serious misstatement of significance levels cross sectional dependence in stock returns data is likely to exist when at least some of the returns are sampled from common time periods this would be the case in all studies of the reaction of stock prices to a

the impacts of teacher working conditions and human capital on student achievement evidence from brazilian longitudinal data abstractwe use a new longitudinal matched student teacher data from brazil to examine the impacts of teacher human capital and working conditions on student learning controlling for student teache

does auditor reputation matter the case of kpmg germany and comroad ag we study the stock and audit market effects associated with a widely publicized accounting scandal involving a public company comroad ag and a large reputable audit firm kpmg in a country germany that has long provided auditors with substantial protection from shareholder legal liability we use this event to study whether an auditor s reputation helps to ensure audit quality a rationale for which recent literature and events provide scant support given the absence of a strong insurance rationale for audit quality germany permits a relatively clean test of whether auditor reputation matters we find that kpmg s clients sustain negative abnormal returns of 3 at events pertaining to comroad and that these returns are more negative for companies that are likely to have higher demands for audit quality we also find an increase in the number of clients that drop kpmg in the year of the comroad scandal mostly smaller recently public companies that are similar to comroad overall our results provide support for the reputation rationale for audit quality

investing in schools capital spending facility conditions and student achievement abstract public investments in repairs modernization and construction of schools cost billions however little is known about the nature of school facility investments whether it actually changes the physical condition of public schools and the subsequent causal impacts on student achievement we study the achievement effects of nearly 1400 capital campaigns initiated and financed by local school districts comparing districts where school capital bonds were either narrowly approved or defeated by district voters overall we find little evidence that these school capital campaigns improve student achievement event study analysis focused on the students actually affected by large campus renovations also generates very precise zero estimates of achievement effects thus u s school capital campaigns financed by local districts the predominant method through which facility investments are made may be a limited tool for realizing substantial gains in student achievement or closing achievement gaps

does greater school autonomy make a difference evidence from a randomized natural experiment in south korea abstract we exploit the unique features of high schools in seoul to study the effects of school autonomy on student outcomes under south korea s equalization policy both private and public schools in seoul admit students that are assigned randomly to them receive equal government funding charge identical fees and use similar curricula however private schools have greater flexibility in personnel decisions and their principals and teachers face stronger incentives to perform we find that private high schools have better student outcomes than public high schools our results suggest that autonomy in personnel decisions explains the positive student outcomes in private schools

generalizations about using value added measures of teacher quality the extensive investigation of the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results first there is sub stantial variation in teacher quality as measured by the value added to achievement or future aca demic attainment or earnings second variables often used to determine entry into the profession and salaries including post graduate schooling experience and licensing examination scores appear to explain little of the variation in teacher quality so measured with the exception of early experience together these findings underscore explicitly that observed teacher characteristics do not represent teacher quality

disruption versus tiebout improvement the costs and benefits of switching schools most students change schools at some point in their academic careers but some change very frequently and some schools experience a great deal of turnover while many argue that mobility harms students economists tend to emphasize tiebout type moves to procure better school quality sq this paper disentangles the disruption effects of moves from changes in sq importantly it identifies the negative externality movers impose on other students student turnover is shown to entail a substantial cost for movers and non movers alike this cost appears to be larger for lower income and minority students who typically attend much higher turnover schools

the effect of school closings on student achievement abstract many school districts across the country are shutting schools but school closing policies remain a very controversial issue the current study investigates the effects of school closing policies on student achievement by examining over 200 school closings in michigan relative to the previous literature the analysis uses a broader set of school closings to thoroughly investigate heterogeneity in treatment effects based on the performance level of the closed school the results indicate that on average school closings in michigan did no persistent harm to the achievement of displaced students moreover students displaced from relatively low performing schools experience achievement gains the displacement of students and teachers creates modest negative spillover effects on the receiving schools however hence the closing of low performing schools may generate some achievement gains for displaced students but not without imposing spillover effects on a large number of students in receiving schools

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

the effects of class size on student achievement new evidence from population variation abstract i identify the effects of class size on student achievement using longitudinal variation in the population associated with each grade in 649 elementary schools i use variation in class size driven by idiosyncratic variation in the population i also use discrete jumps in class size that occur when a small change in enrollment triggers a maximum or minimum class size rule the estimates indicate that class size does not have a statistically significant effect on student achievement i rule out even modest effects 2 to 4 percent of a standard deviation in scores for a 10 percent reduction in class size

the trade off between child quantity and quality an empirical investigation of trade offs between number of children and their scholastic performance confirms that family size directly affects children s achievement though parents show no favori

productivity returns to experience in the teacher labor market methodological challenges and new evidence on long term career improvement abstract we present new evidence on the relationship between teacher productivity and job experience econometric challenges require identifying assumptions to model the within teacher returns to experience with teacher fixed effects we describe the identifying assumptions used in past models and in a new approach that we propose and we demonstrate how violations of these assumptions can lead to substantial bias consistent with past research we find that teachers experience rapid productivity improvement early in their careers however we also find evidence of returns to experience later in the career indicating that teachers continue to build human capital beyond these first years

teaching to the rating school accountability and the distribution of student achievement this paper examines whether minimum competency school accountability systems such as those created under no child left behind influence the distribution of student achievement because school ratings in these systems only incorporate students test scores via pass rates this type of system increases incentives for schools to improve the performance of students who are on the margin of passing but does not increase short run incentives for schools to improve other students performance using student level panel data from texas during the 1990 s i explicitly calculate schools short run incentives to improve various students expected performance and i find that schools do respond to these incentives students perform better than expected when their test score is particularly important for their schools accountability rating also low achieving students perform better than expected in math when many of their classmates math scores are important for the schools rating while relatively high achieving students do not perform better distributional effects appear to be related to broad changes in resources or instruction as well as narrowly tailored attempts to improve the performance of specific students

private or public school advantage evidence from 40 countries using pisa 2012 mathematics abstractit is known that in most countries private school students outperform students in public schools in international assessments however the empirical literature recognizes that assessing the true effect of private school attendance requires addressing selection and sorting issues on both observabland unobservables the existing empirical evidence on the private school effect mostly covers oecd and latin american countries with little evidence on other parts of the world there is recent emerging country specific evidence doubting the existence of a private school advantage i use pisa 2012 data for mathematics and two different methodologies to derive baseline and bias corrected estimates of the private dependent and independent school effect for 40 countries a robust private school advantage is found only in a handful of countries public schools generally perform as well as private subsidized schools and outperform independent schools accounting for both peer effects and selection is necessa