better schools less crime i estimate the impact of attending a first choice middle or high school on adult crime using data from public school choice lotteries in charlotte mecklenburg school district cms seven years after random assignment lottery winners had been arrested for fewer serious crimes and had spent fewer days incarcerated the gain in school quality as measured by peer and teacher inputs was equivalent to moving from one of the lowest ranked schools to one at the district average the reduction in crime comes largely from years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete the impacts are concentrated among high risk youth who commit about 50 less crime across several different outcome measures and scalings of crime by severity i find suggestive evidence that school quality explains more of the impact in high school whereas peer effects are more important in middle school copyright 2011 oxford university press

how vouchers could change the market for education small probability that vouchers will in the foreseeable future be adopted on a large scale in any school district or state at the moment only three states have adopted publicly funded voucher programs and all of these programs are limited in scale nonetheless in recent years over 40 state legislatures have considered proposals to provide some type of voucher program or tuition tax credit for at least some families in a given state or school district and the children s scholarship fund see http www scholarshipfund org has helped create or expand privately funded voucher programs in numerous cities as vouchers become a more significant part of education policy debates the time is right to consider what we know and do not know about the likely effects of adopting various voucher schemes in the balance of this paper i describe both empirical and theoretical work on education that speaks to this topic i argue that we cannot confidently predict the outcomes that would result from various voucher schemes and i also stress that debates over vouchers per se are not informative details concerning funding targeting and discretion in the use of vouchers should greatly affect the outcomes associated with any particular voucher program still empirical evidence on the performance of public versus private schools as well as numerical results from existing simulation models suggest that policymakers should be able to design voucher programs that would be helpful to minority students in large cities public schools in large cities often perform poorly in minority neighborhoods and this is especially true in economically disadvantaged areas

valuing cultural world heritage sites an application of the travel cost method to mont saint michel abstractthis article using the zonal version of the travel cost method ztcm provides the first economic valuation of recreational trips to mont saint michel msm the msm was designated as united nations educational scientific and cultural organization world heritage site in 1979 and is the most visited coastal site in france the potential effects on consumer surplus cs estimates of some aspects of the ztcm are considered namely the treatment of the multiple purpose destination mp d trips the inclusion of the opportunity cost of time oct in the recreation demand model and the heterogeneity in the preferences the heterogeneity in the preferences is examined through a random parameters poisson model rppm the rppm generalizes the standard poisson model spm by allowing coefficients of explanatory variables to vary randomly across geographical units rather than being fixed our results show that 1 substantial cs values are associated with the msm 2 excluding ignoring mp d trips resul

cheap talk with two senders and complementary information this paper studies a cheap talk model with two senders having partial and non overlapping private information communicating with an uninformed receiver the two senders private information is complementary in the sense that the marginal impact of one sender s private information on the receiver s ideal action depends on the other sender s private information when the two senders communicate simultaneously their information transmission exhibits strategic complementarity more information transmitted by one sender leads to more information transmitted by the other sender when the two senders have like biases it is always optimal for the receiver to delegate the decision rights to the sender with a smaller bias when two senders have opposing biases simultaneous communication is more likely to dominate delegation

a note on estimating nested constant elasticity of substitution preferences for outdoor recreation a generalized version of a well known statistical result is used to suggest an alternative strategy for estimating nested constant elasticity of substitution preferences for recreation demand parameter and welfare estimates from nested constant elasticity of substitution count data demand system models are presented and compared to estimates from the multinomial approaches developed previously a significant advantage of the count data estimation strategy over the multinomial based approaches is that the analyst avoids the difficulties associated with choice occasion specification and interpretation copyright 2003 oxford university press

the recreational value of lake mckenzie fraser island an application of the travel cost method lake mckenzie is one of the most highly used and popular visitor destinations of all fraser island s natural sites attracting 2000 visitors a day in peak periods many consider this level of visitation to be unsustainable and the management authority is currently considering a range of management options to address this issue in assessing the alternatives it is useful to have some idea of the recreational use value of the lake under the current regime as it is this value that is at risk if visitor numbers are to be reduced this paper using the zonal travel cost method estimates the recreational use value of fraser island and lake mckenzie for australian resident independent visitors

estimating social welfare using count data models an application to long run recreation demand under conditions of endogenous stratification and truncation this paper develops a negative binomial model of recreation demand that corrects for both truncation and endogenous stratification this approach recovers the demand associated with the general population not just the users of the site this model demonstrates the importance of the joint nature of the population s latent demand for trips and the consumer surplus associated with those trips the empirical results provide an estimate of the willingness to pay by washington state residents for hiking opportunities in the cascade mountain range these results are used to forecast total trips and willingness to pay over the next forty years copyright 1995 by mit press

valuing the benefits of coastal water quality improvements using contingent and real behaviour recent moves in the european union have beenmade towards a toughening of legislation onbathing water quality this has focussedpolicy makers thoughts on the welfare benefitsresulting from such improvements especiallygiven their cost our paper uses a combinedstated and revealed preference approach tovalue coastal water quality improvements focussing on an area of scotland which hasconsistently failed to meet standards under thebathing waters directive we combine data onreal behaviour with data on contingentbehaviour using a random effects negativebinomial panel model this allows us to predictboth the change in participation trips shouldwater quality be improved and the welfareincrease per trip our model includes allowancefor the existence of substitute sites and forchanges in recreational behaviour during abeach visit

experimentally estimated impacts of school vouchers on college enrollment and degree attainment abstract we provide the first experimental estimates of the long term impacts of a voucher to attend private school by linking data from a privately sponsored voucher initiative in new york city which awarded the scholarships by lottery to low income families to administrative records on college enrollment and degree attainment we find no significant effects on college enrollment or four year degree attainment of the offer of a voucher however we find substantial marginally significant impacts for minority students and large significant impacts for the children of women born in the united states negative point estimates for the children of non minority and foreign born mothers are not statistically significant at conventional levels the information needed to match students to administrative data on postsecondary outcomes was available for 99 of the sample we find evidence of substantial bias due to attrition in the original evaluation which relied on data collected at follow up sessions

private school vouchers and student achievement an evaluation of the milwaukee parental choice program in 1990 wisconsin began providing vouchers to a small number of low income students to attend nonsectarian private schools controlling for individual fixed effects i compare the test scores of students selected to attend a participating private school with those of unsuccessful applicants and other students from the milwaukee public schools i find that students in the milwaukee parental choice program had faster math score gains than but similar reading score gains to the comparison groups the results appear robust to data imputations and sample attrition although these deficiencies of the data should be kept in mind when interpreting the results

on site time in the demand for recreation the standard travel cost model has treated on site time ambiguously over the years this paper shows how to handle on site time by exploring the implications of two assumptions in the travel cost model first people choose the amount of time that they spend on a site and second the time spent on site is exogenous this paper uses a duality result to show that when on site time is chosen the standard travel cost demand function takes a particularly simple form with slight modification standard estimation and welfare calculations continue to hold

endogenously chosen travel costs and the travel cost model an application to mountain biking at moab utah the travel cost model is frequently used to estimate net willingness to pay for recreation at remote sites by using the visitor s travel costs as a proxy for the price of recreation however some concern has been raised over the validity of using the visitor s stated travel costs as a proxy for price this paper addresses some of these concerns by examining the possible over estimation of consumer surplus due to endogenously chosen travel costs this paper extends past theoretical work for the linear model by developing a correction for endogenously chosen travel costs in more commonly used nonlinear models such as the poisson or count data model also provided is the first empirical test of the presence of endogeneity and an estimate of the magnitude of the error from ignoring endogeneity in travel costs after applying this test and the correction to data that was gathered for mountain biking at moab utah the estimate of consumer surplus falls from us 153 to us 135 which is a 12 reduction

school vouchers a survey of the economics literature we review the theoretical computational and empirical research on school vouchers with a focus on the latter our assessment is that the evidence to date is not sufficient to warrant recommending that vouchers be adopted on a widespread basis however multiple positive findings support continued exploration specifically the empirical research on small scale programs does not suggest that awarding students a voucher is a systematically reliable way to improve educational outcomes and some detrimental effects have been found nevertheless in some settings or for some subgroups or outcomes vouchers can have a substantial positive effect on those who use them studies of large scale voucher programs find student sorting as a result of their implementation although of varying magnitude evidence on both small scale and large scale programs suggests that competition induced by vouchers leads public schools to improve moreover research is making progress on understanding how vouchers may be designed to limit adverse effects from sorting while preserving positive effects related to competition finally our sense is that work originating in a single case e g a given country or in a single research approach e g experimental designs will not provide a full understanding of voucher effects fairly wide ranging empirical and theoretical work will be necessary to make progress

how does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings evidence from project star in project star 11 571 students in tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade this article evaluates the long term impacts of star by linking the experimental data to administrative records we first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27 college attendance home ownership and retirement savings we then document four sets of experimental impacts first students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27 but this effect is imprecisely estimated second students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings third an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades k 3 as measured by classmates end of class test scores have higher earnings college attendance rates and other outcomes finally the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in noncognitive measures persist

a latent class approach to modeling endogenous spatial sorting in zonal recreation demand models a method for incorporating unobserved heterogeneity into aggregate count data frameworks is presented and used to control for endogenous spatial sorting in zonal recreation models the method is based on latent class analysis which has become a popular tool for analyzing heterogeneous preferences with individual data but has not yet been applied to aggregate count data the method is tested using data on backcountry hikers for a southern california study site and performs well for relatively small numbers of classes the latent class model produces substantially smaller welfare estimates compared to a constrained version that assumes homogeneity throughout the population

using count data models in travel cost analysis with aggregate data estimators of recreational demand models frequently use continuous functional forms such as ordinary least squares ols on log transformed variables e g ziemer musser and hill however the nature of trip demand introduces complicating factors first trips occur in nonnegative quantities failure to control for this censoring will lead to biased estimation second because trips are available only in integer quantities the usual demand models which correlate marginal quantity with marginal price may be inapplicable in light of these factors a natural alternative is to use statistical models that explicitly recognize the count nature of trip demand several recent papers e g shaw smith grogger and carson creel and loomis have applied count models to the travel cost model these works largely have focused on truncated data sets based on choice based samples in this study the focus is on the older problem where zero demanders are included in particular the application of several robust estimators of count models to aggregated data will be considered the poisson distribution forms the foundation for the count models examined in this study although the poisson is a convenient distribution to work with it imposes some stringent constraints on the demand distribution in particular the poisson distribution assumes the variance of trip demand is equal to the expected value of trip demand to loosen these constraints a generalization of the poisson the negative binomial is discussed robust estimation procedures that permit further loosening of a priori assumptions are then reviewed permit data from the boundary waters canoe area are used to examine the effects of these count models on consumer surplus estimates and on coefficient variability

addressing aggregation bias in zonal recreation models abstract models of recreation demand are often based on zonal data results from such models are susceptible to aggregation bias we propose a zonal model of recreation that captures some of the underlying heterogeneity of individual visitors by incorporating distributional information on per capita income from census sources into the aggregate demand function this adjustment eliminates the unrealistic constraint of constant income across zonal residents and thus reduces the risk of aggregation bias in estimated parameters in addition the corrected aggregate specification reinstates the applicability of generalized maximum likelihood methods and increases model efficiency

when does coordination require centralization corrigendum the equations on page 153 of when does coordination require centralization which appeared in the march 2008 issue of the american economic review failed to print in their entirety the complete text of section iii decision making appears below

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

optimal limited authority for principal abstract this article studies a principal agent problem where the only commitment for the uninformed principal is to restrict the set of decisions she makes following a report by the informed agent we show that an ex ante optimal equilibrium for the principal corresponds to a finite partition of the state space and each retained decision is ex post suboptimal for the principal biased toward the agent s preference generally an optimal equilibrium does not maximize the number of decisions the principal can credibly retain compared to no commitment limited authority improves the quality of communication from the agent as a result it can give the principal a higher expected payoff than delegating the decision to the agent