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

research design meets market design using centralized assignment for impact evaluation a growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed the resulting random assignment opens the door to credible quasi experimental research designs for the evaluation of school effectiveness yet the question of how best to separate the lottery generated randomization integral to such designs from non random preferences and priorities remains open this paper develops easily implemented empirical strategies that fully exploit the random assignment embedded in a wide class of mechanisms while also revealing why seats are randomized at one school but not another we use these methods to evaluate charter schools in denver one of a growing number of districts that combine charter and traditional public schools in a unified assignment system the resulting estimates show large achievement gains from charter school attendance our approach generates efficiency gains over ad hoc methods such as those that focus on schools ranked first while also identifying a more representative average causal effect we also show how to use centralized assignment mechanisms to identify causal effects in models with multiple school sectors

unlocking crop biotechnology in developing countries a report from the field abstract disputes continue to flare over acceptable safety standards for biotechnology products and the potential for these technologies to address agricultural needs benefits have been documented for a limited number of genetically modified gm crops however official permission to plant gm seeds in developing countries has not been granted in most countries six country studies examined regulatory decision making efficiencies and bottlenecks for gm crops building on these a conceptual framework is proposed for implementing biosafety the paper then highlights political trade and market issues external to the framework and concludes with recommendations to help unlock gm safety approvals

the economic impact of genetically modified cotton on south african smallholders yield profit and health effects abstract results of a large scale survey of resource poor smallholder cotton farmers in south africa over three years conclusively show that adopters of bt cotton have benefited in terms of higher yields lower pesticide use less labour for pesticide application and substantially higher gross margins per hectare these benefits were clearly related to the technology and not to preferential adoption by farmers who were already highly efficient the smallest producers are shown to have benefited from adoption of the bt variety as much as if not more than larger producers moreover evidence from hospital records suggests a link between declining pesticide poisonings and adoption of the bt variety

a trait based model of the potential demand for a genetically engineered food crop in a developing economy we predict the potential demand of smallholder farmers for genetically transformed varieties of a food crop the cooking banana of the east african highlands farmer demand for planting material is derived in an agricultural household model that accounts for variety traits and missing markets the demand for candidate host varieties is predicted using a zero inflated poisson zip regression system the fitted model is used to illustrate the sensitivity of farmer demand for improved planting material to a investments in research and development represented by the effectiveness of gene insertion and expression and b other public investments in education extension and market infrastructure that support diffusion by comparing the characteristics of agricultural households we demonstrate that the choice of host variety can have social consequences favoring one rural population compared with another clients for transgenic banana planting material are likely to be poorer subsistence oriented farmers in areas greatly affected by biotic constraints a model of this type might be useful in assessing the investments needed to support the systematic dissemination of improved planting material the approach can be generalized to other crop biotechnologies for smallholder farming systems particularly in developing economies

school choice school quality and postsecondary attainment we study the impact of a public school choice lottery in charlotte mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion we find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school using rich administrative data on peers teachers course offerings and other inputs we show that the impacts of choice are strongly predicted by gains on several measures of school quality gains in attainment are concentrated among girls girls respond to attending a better school with higher grades and increases in college preparatory course taking while boys do not

the role of nonfarm income in coping with the effects of drought in southern mozambique to reduce their dependence on subsistence agriculture farm households in rural africa may diversify their income sources by participating in the nonfarm sector in years of drought nonfarm income can also be part of the coping strategies a multivariate sample selection model was used to analyze three years of data from a nationally representative household survey in mozambique the analysis was guided by the following three questions during a drought year 1 do households increase their participation in nonfarm activities 2 are poorer households as likely as others to participate in and benefit from nonfarm activities and 3 which factors are associated with higher nonfarm incomes the results suggest that households are more likely to engage in at least one nonfarm income generating activity during a drought year although poorer households are more likely to engage in nonfarm activities they are less likely to participate in nonfarm activities of high return the results suggest that policies reducing entry barriers e g improved road infrastructure micro credit schemes and livestock promotion programs and increasing education levels can facilitate income diversification thus allowing rural households to better cope with the effects of drought when designing polices care must be taken to avoid exacerbating income inequality by targeting measures toward poorer and female headed households

teacher pay reform and productivity panel data evidence from adoptions of q comp in minnesota this paper studies the impacts of teacher pay for performance p4p reforms adopted with complementary human resource management hrm practices on student achievement and workforce flows since 2005 dozens of minnesota school districts in cooperation with teachers unions implemented p4p as part of the state s quality compensation program exploiting district variation in participation status and timing we find evidence that p4p centered hrm reform raises students achievement by 0 03 standard deviations falsification tests suggest that gains are causal they appear to be driven especially by productivity increases among less experienced teachers

private equity jobs and productivity private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses and few gains in operating performance to evaluate these claims we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers us buyouts from 1980 to 2005 we track 3 200 target firms and their 150 000 establishments before and after acquisition comparing to controls defined by industry size age and prior growth buyouts lead to modest net job losses but large increases in gross job creation and destruction buyouts also bring tfp gains at target firms mainly through accelerated exit of less productive establishments and greater entry of highly productive ones jel d24 g24 g32

a bottom up approach to the risk adjusted performance of the buyout fund market we use the burgiss dataset to study private equity buyout fund performance our findings on performance before risk adjustments are consistent with those in the literature and indicate significant outperformance of buyout fund investments using a bottom up approach we identify the systematic risks of underlying companies in buyout funds to inform an appropriate risk adjusted benchmark which we determine to be a levered size and sector adjusted public index after making these risk adjustments we find no significant outperformance of buyout fund investments versus the public market equivalent on a dollar weighted basis we contend that even without significant risk adjusted outperformance buyout funds can play a valuable role in institutional investors portfolios

school segregation educational attainment and crime evidence from the end of busing in charlotte mecklenburg we study the end of race based busing in charlotte mecklenburg schools cms in 2001 school boundaries in cms were redrawn dramatically and half of students received a new assignment using addresses measured prior to the policy change we compare students in the same neighborhood that lived on opposite sides of a newly drawn boundary we find that both white and minority students score lower on high school exams when they are assigned to schools with more minority students we also find decreases in high school graduation and four year college attendance for whites and large increases in crime for minority males we conclude that the end of race based busing widened racial inequality despite efforts by cms to mitigate the effect of segregation through compensatory resource allocation jel codes i20 i24

surplus distribution from the introduction of a biotechnology innovation we examine the distribution of welfare from the introduction of bt cotton in the united states in 1996 the welfare framework explicitly recognizes that research protected by intellectual property rights generates monopoly profits and makes it possible to partition these rents among consumers farmers and the innovating input firms we calculate a total increase in world surplus of 240 3 million for 1996 of this total the largest share 59 went to u s farmers the gene developer monsanto received the next largest share 21 followed by u s consumers 9 the rest of the world 6 and the germplasm supplier delta and pine land company 5

optimal taxation in theory and practice the optimal design of a tax system is a topic that has long fascinated economic theorists and flummoxed economic policymakers this paper explores the interplay between tax theory and tax policy it identifies key lessons policymakers might take from the academic literature on how taxes ought to be designed and it discusses the extent to which these lessons are reflected in actual tax policy we begin with a brief overview of how economists think about optimal tax policy based largely on the foundational work of ramsey 1927 and mirrlees 1971 we then put forward eight general lessons suggested by optimal tax theory as it has developed in recent decades 1 optimal marginal tax rate schedules depend on the distribution of ability 2 the optimal marginal tax schedule could decline at high incomes 3 a flat tax with a universal lump sum transfer could be close to optimal 4 the optimal extent of redistribution rises with wage inequality 5 taxes should depend on personal characteristics as well as income 6 only final goods ought to be taxed and typically they ought to be taxed uniformly 7 capital income ought to be untaxed at least in expectation and 8 in stochastic dynamic economies optimal tax policy requires increased sophistication for each lesson we discuss its theoretical underpinnings and the extent to which it is consistent with actual tax policy to preview our conclusions we find that there has been considerable change in the theory and practice of taxation over the past several decades although the two paths have been far from parallel overall tax policy has moved in the y n gregory mankiw is professor of economics matthew weinzierl is assistant professor of business administration and danny yagan is a ph d candidate in economics all at harvard university cambridge massachusetts their e mail addresses are ngmankiw

indian farmers valuation of yield distributions will poor farmers value pro poor seeds abstract potential poverty traps among the rural poor suggest a need to reduce poor farmers vulnerability by stabilizing crop yields and limiting yield losses advances in biotechnology will help address this need directly with crops that tolerate climate fluctuation or resist biotic stresses evaluating ex ante how farmers will value these pro poor seeds is important for delivery design but also challenging this paper describes an experimental economic approach to understanding farmers valuation of such seeds using data from a survey and experiment i assess indian farmers valuation of changes in the mean variance and skewness of payoff distributions these farmers value increases in expected value but seem indifferent about higher moment changes in payoff distributions farmer traits such as wealth and risk exposure affect their valuation of these changes only mildly while various limitations to the experimental approach must qualify practical implications of these findings the experiment demonstrates the viability of conducting valuation experiments with open ended questions in developing countries

charters without lotteries testing takeovers in new orleans and boston charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools we develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar schools not yet taken over grandfathering estimates from new orleans show substantial gains from takeover enrollment in boston grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned charter seats in lotteries a non charter boston turnaround intervention that had much in common with the takeover strategy generated gains as large as those seen for takeovers while other more modest turnaround interventions yielded smaller effects

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

leveraging lotteries for school value added testing and estimation conventional value added models vams compare average test scores across schools after regression adjusting for students demographic characteristics and previous scores this article tests for vam bias using a procedure that asks whether vam estimates accurately predict the achievement consequences of random assignment to specific schools test results from admissions lotteries in boston suggest conventional vam estimates are biased a finding that motivates the development of a hierarchical model describing the joint distribution of school value added bias and lottery compliance we use this model to assess the substantive importance of bias in conventional vam estimates and to construct hybrid value added estimates that optimally combine ordinary least squares and lottery based estimates of vam parameters the hybrid estimation strategy provides a general recipe for combining nonexperimental and quasi experimental estimates while still biased hybrid school value added estimates have lower mean squared error than conventional vam estimates simulations calibrated to the boston data show that bias notwithstanding policy decisions based on conventional vams that control for lagged achievement are likely to generate substantial achievement gains hybrid estimates that incorporate lotteries yield further gains

pro poor agricultural biotechnology can the international research system deliver the goods abstract while global investment in agricultural research by the private sector is increasing with growth in developing country markets and the emergence of new technologies complementary public sector investment is stagnating or declining in many developing countries this review argues that the changing roles of the public and private sectors in generating new scientific knowledge may adversely affect the diffusion of explicitly pro poor technologies technologies that are simultaneously yield enhancing and poverty reducing comparing historical evidence from the green revolution with recent evidence from the emerging era of agricultural biotechnology this review argues that a more pluralistic international system for agricultural research will be more responsive to poverty only if the strategic leadership role of the public sector is strengthened certain research functions are reallocated to the private sector and new policy and organizational mechanisms are used to stimulate pro poor research in and for developing country agriculture

good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions by j esse m r othstein school choice policies may by aligning admin istrators incentives with parental demand yield improved efficiency in educational production milton friedman 1962 john e chubb and terry m moe 1990 but eric a hanushek 1981 cautions if the efficiency of our school systems is due to poor incentives for teachers and admin istrators coupled with poor decision making by consumers it would be unwise to expect much from programs that seek to strengthen market forces in the selection of schools p 35 empha sis added poor decision making is not required parents may rationally choose schools with pleasant surroundings athletic facilities cultural advantages ibid p 34 over those that most efficiently pursue academic performance they may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those that are more effective but en roll worse students j douglas willms and frank h echols 1992 1993 or they may simply be unable to identify effective schools thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2002 any factor that leads parents to choose any but the most effective available schools will tend to dilute the incentives for efficient management that choice might otherwise create this study examines the distribution of stu dent outcomes across schools within metropol itan housing markets for evidence on parental demand economists have long noted that par ents choices among residential locations are potentially informative about how more com plete choice systems may operate charles m tiebout 1956 melvin v borland and roy m howsen 1992 caroline m hoxby 2000 rothstein 2005 1 i ask whether school effec tiveness plays a sufficiently important role in these decisions to create meaningful incentives for more productive school management i adopt a specific understanding of effective ness appropriate to the question at hand a substantial portion of between school differ ences in student performance can be attributed to differences in student body composition this portion includes the effects of individual stu dent characteristics on their own test scores any direct peer group effects and any indirect ef fects of a school s composition on the quality of its instruction if wealthy schools attract better teachers joseph r antos and sherwin rosen 1975 or more parental involvement this is for my purposes a peer effect it depends on the quality of the school s administration only via school composition a school administrator cannot attract demand by offering a school with wealthy students as these can be offered only if wealthy families demand the school in the first place only the remaining portion of a school s contribution to test scores is effectiveness 2 department of economics and woodrow wilson school princeton university wallace hall 3 rd floor princeton nj 08544 e mail jrothst princeton edu i thank alan auerbach tom davidoff caroline hoxby jus tin mccrary rob mcmillan john quigley cecilia rouse emmanuel saez till von wachter four anonymous refer ees editor robert moffitt seminar participants at several institutions and especially david card for helpful sugges tions i am grateful to the college board for essential data and to a national science foundation graduate research fellowship and the fisher center for real estate and urban economics at uc berkeley for funding see cecilia elena rouse 1998 julie b cullen et al 2005 william g howell et al 2002 and alan b krueger and pei zhu 2004 for analyses of several existing nonresidential choice programs though none focuses on the particular issue studied here this definition avoids the need to find observable de terminants of effectiveness which have proved elusive hanushek 1986 my definition however ignores a school s contribution to nontest outcomes e g sports or music if such outcomes motivate parental choices i will conclude that parents do not demand effective schools of

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

the effect of school construction on test scores school enrollment and home prices abstract this paper provides new evidence on the effect of elementary and middle school construction projects on home prices academic achievement and school enrollment combining the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district with panel data on student test scores and neighborhoods of residence we find that by six years after building occupancy school construction increases reading scores by 0 15 standard deviations relative to the year before building occupancy we do not observe similar effects for math scores school construction raised home prices in affected neighborhoods by roughly 10 and led to increased public school enrollment

the performance and competitive effects of school autonomy this paper studies a recent british reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997 and using a version of the regression discontinuity design i find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost despite other reforms that ensured that the british education system was by international standards highly competitive a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over

why new crop technology is not scale neutral a critique of the expectations for a crop based african green revolution poverty reduction during the asian green revolution has been attributed to the inherent scale neutrality of new crop varieties making them equally beneficial to small scale and large scale farmers the term scale neutral is now reappearing in debates on agricultural development in africa with claims that crop technology is inherently scale neutral and that african smallholders will significantly benefit from new crop varieties not specifically developed for their contexts using a social shaping of technology sst perspective and the concept of biological embeddedness this paper critically examines whether it is helpful to describe crop technology as scale neutral when drawing lessons from the asian green revolution about how new crop technology can be of benefit to african smallholders the paper describes how political commitment rather than inherently scale neutral crops was central for the outcome of the asian green revolution it also highlights that while the effects of crop biology are often disregarded in adoption studies biology significantly affected the ability of green revolution crop technology to benefit smallholders and continues to do so today using maize and gm crops as examples this paper suggests that gm crops in their current form have reinforced a technological trajectory established with hybrid technology and directed it away from smallholder practices and agroecologies consequently describing crop technology as inherently scale neutral is not helpful for understanding how crop technology works in africa today and prevents important lessons being learned from the asian green revolution

tournament incentives for teachers evidence from a scaled up intervention in chile abstractin this article we evaluate the effects of the introduction of group monetary incentives for teachers based on a school performance tournament in chile this is particularly relevant to analyze since it is the only scaled up incentive program for teachers in the world we evaluate the tournament effect that is the effect of introducing the incentive scheme on all participant schools both winning and losing we compare public and private subsidized schools to private fee paying schools following a matched difference in difference and using three different empirical approaches we explore the heterogeneous impact of the treatment through the distribution of the probability of winning the results indicate a positive and significant tournament effect especially for schools that are very likely to win which we call on the money

the welfare effects of coordinated assignment evidence from the new york city high school match abstract coordinated single offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform we show that uncoordinated offers in nyc s school assignment mechanism generated mismatches one third of

productivity crowding out in labor markets with motivated workers abstract when workers intrinsic motivation matters a wage increase has mixed consequences on applicants productivity and motivation as shown in public service healthcare education and politics in a simple theoretical framework where ability and motivation are workers private information we rationalize these differentiated responses and identify intuitive conditions for higher wages inducing self selection of more or less productive and motivated workers the selection patterns depend both on the statistical association between workers characteristics and on the difference between the incentivized returns to ability across sectors we emphasize a crowding out effect of wage on workers productivity that has not been analyzed in the theoretical literature before

using school choice lotteries to test measures of school effectiveness abstract value added models vams are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness yet random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of vams and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools in this paper i use random assignment from a public school choice lottery to test the predictive power of vam specifications in vams with minimal controls and two or more years of prior data i fail to reject the hypothesis that school effects are unbiased overall many commonly used vams are accurate predictors of student achievement gains

do college preparatory programs improve long term outcomes this paper presents an analysis of the longer run effects of a college preparatory program implemented in inner city schools that provided teacher training in addition to payments to 11th and 12th grade students and their teachers for passing scores on advanced placement ap exams affected students passed more ap exams were more likely to remain in college beyond their first and second years and earned higher wages effects are particularly pronounced for hispanic students who experienced a 2 5 percentage point increase in college degree attainment and an 11 increase in earnings while the study is based on nonexperimental variation the results are robust across a variety of specifications and most plausible sources of bias are ruled out the results provide credible evidence that implementing high quality college preparatory programs in existing urban schools can improve the long run educational and labor market outcomes of disadvantaged youth jel i2 i24 j0

plant variety protection in developing countries a report from the field the establishment of intellectual property rights iprs for plant varieties has caused considerable controversy but there is relatively little empirical evidence on performance and options in developing countries this paper summarizes the results of a recent five country study concentrating on the conduct of plant variety protection pvp regimes it examines pvp in the context of other mechanisms that provide incentives for plant breeding it discusses the principal options available to developing countries and examines the ability of pvp to offer protection from competing firms and from on farm seed saving it also looks at the administrative and management requirements of pvp regimes although the paper does not discuss patent protection for biotechnology it examines the ipr requirements for the introduction of transgenic varieties developing countries need to establish an appropriate pvp system but pvp should be seen as part of a broader strategy for seed system development

the aggregate effect of school choice evidence from a two stage experiment in india we present experimental evidence on the impact of a school choice program in the indian state of andhra pradesh that provided students with a voucher to finance attending a private school of their choice the study design featured a unique two stage lottery based allocation of vouchers that created both student level and market level experiments which allows us to study the individual and the aggregate effects of school choice including spillovers after two and four years of the program we find no difference between test scores of lottery winners and losers on telugu native language math english and science social studies suggesting that the large cross sectional differences in test scores across public and private schools mostly reflect omitted variables however private schools also teach hindi which is not taught by the public schools and lottery winners have much higher test scores in hindi furthermore the mean cost per student in the private schools in our sample was less than a third of the cost in public schools thus private schools in this setting deliver slightly better test score gains than their public counterparts better on hindi and same in other subjects and do so at a substantially lower cost per student finally we find no evidence of spillovers on public school students who do not apply for the voucher or on private school students suggesting that the positive effects on voucher winners did not come at the expense of other students jel codes c93 h44 h52 i21 o15

private equity performance what do we know we study the performance of nearly 1400 u s buyout and venture capital funds using a new dataset from burgiss we find better buyout fund performance than has previously been documented performance consistently has exceeded that of public markets outperformance versus the s p 500 averages 20 to 27 over a fund s life and more than 3 annually venture capital funds outperformed public equities in the 1990s but underperformed in the 2000s our conclusions are robust to various indices and risk controls performance in cambridge associates and preqin is qualitatively similar to that in burgiss but is lower in thomson venture economics

roundup ready soybeans in argentina farm level and aggregate welfare effects although adoption rates of genetically modified crops have been staggering in some countries there is still comparatively little evidence about biotechnology impacts under diverse agroecological and institutional conditions these knowledge gaps lead to an overly precautious attitude among policy makers and the public this article analyzes the effects of roundup ready rr soybeans in argentina the country with the second biggest transgenic area worldwide based on recent survey data it is shown that the technology increases total factor productivity by 10 on average with cost savings being somewhat more pronounced for smaller than for larger farms the reduction in use of toxic herbicides and of tillage operations entails positive environmental repercussions aggregate welfare effects are computed over the 1996 2001 period with a three region partial equilibrium model comprising argentina the united states and the rest of the world in 2001 rr soybeans created more than us 1 2 billion of economic surplus at the global level the largest share went to consumers 53 followed by seed and biotechnology firms 34 and agricultural producers 13 due to comparatively weak intellectual property protection and thus only small technology mark ups in seed prices and widespread adoption argentine soybean growers receive 90 of the benefits in that country this demonstrates that farmers in developing countries can gain considerably when they obtain access to suitable foreign innovations through technology spill overs

accounting for selectivity and duration dependent heterogeneity when estimating the impact of emigration on incomes and poverty in sending areas the impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data but comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple selectivity problem first households self select into emigration second in some emigrant households everyone moves while others leave members behind and third some emigrants choose to return to the origin country allowing for duration dependent heterogeneity introduces a fourth form of selectivity one must now worry not just about whether households migrate but also when they do so this paper clearly sets out these selectivity issues and their implications for existing migration studies and then addresses them by using survey data designed specifically to take advantage of a randomized lottery that determines which applicants to the over subscribed samoan quota may immigrate to new zealand the analysis compares incomes and poverty rates among left behind members in households in samoa that sent samoan quota emigrants with those for members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the lottery policy rules control who can accompany the principal migrant providing an instrument to address the second selectivity problem while differences among migrants in which year their ballot was selected allow for estimation of duration effects the authors find that migration reduced poverty among former household members but they also find suggestive evidence that this effect may be short lived as both remittances and agricultural income are negatively related to the duration that the migrant has been abroad

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

does management matter in schools we collect data on management practices in over 1 800 high schools in eight countries we show that higher management quality is strongly associated with better educational outcomes the uk sweden canada and the us obtain the highest management scores followed by germany with a gap before italy brazil and india we also show that autonomous government schools government funded but with substantial independence like uk academies and us charters have higher management scores than regular government or private schools almost half of the difference between the management scores of autonomous and regular government schools is accounted for principal leadership and governance there are major disparities in the quality of education within and between countries oecd 2012 school managerial practices may be an important reason for such differences unfortunately understanding the role of management in schools within and across countries has been held back by a lack of robust and comparable instruments to systematically measure management practices and thus a lack of good data the key purpose of this article is to develop an international management index for schools and present descriptive evidence on management quality and education outcomes across schools of different types within and across countries we used double blind telephone interviews with school principals to collect information on management practices for over 1 800 schools across eight countries to construct our management index we average across 20 basic management practice measures in four areas of management operations monitoring target setting and people each question is evaluated against a scoring grid that ranges from one worst practice to five best practice our management index for each school represents the average of these scores we also constructed measures of school level pupil outcomes for these schools when data were available from examination results across regions and countries creating a matched management pupil outcome international data set at the school level these data allow us to document some stylised facts first we show that the adoption of basic managerial practices varies significantly across and within countries the uk sweden canada and the us obtain the highest average scores followed by germany italy and brazil while india has the lowest scores about half of the variance in school management is at the country level this share is larger in education than we have

do college prep programs improve long term outcomes many new education reforms use cash incentives to promote better student outcomes the advanced placement incentive program apip is one example with private donors financing 70 percent of costs the apip trains ap teachers and motivates both students and teachers by paying substantial cash bonuses for passing scores on ap exams so does it work in this working paper ipr labor economist kirabo jackson examines the apip in texas tracking over 290 000 high school students between 1993 and 2008 he compared changes in student outcomes before and after apip adoption at the 58 participating schools to changes across the same cohorts in comparable schools that did not adopt the apip apip adoption increased taking an ap course by 21 percent and passing an ap exam by 45 percent more importantly jackson finds benefits beyond the program for those participating in apip four years after it wasadopted the probability of students persisting in college as sophomores rose by about 20 percent and earnings increased by 3 7 percent the pay increases erased the hispanic white earnings gap and reduced the black white earnings gap by one third the results imply a per pupil lifetime earnings benefit of 16 650 for a cost of 450 jackson s findings suggest that one can raise achievement for students consigned to low achieving urban schools and that high quality college preparatory programs might be a viable alternative to transferring such students to higher achieving schools

injecting charter school best practices into traditional public schools evidence from field experiments this study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing a bundle of best practices from high performing charter schools into low performing traditional public schools in houston texas using a school level randomized field experiment and quasi experimental comparisons the five practices in the bundle are increased instructional time more effective teachers and administrators high dosage tutoring data driven instruction and a culture of high expectations the findings show that injecting best practices from charter schools into traditional houston public schools significantly increases student math achievement in treated elementary and secondary schools by 0 15 to 0 18 standard deviations a year and has little effect on reading achievement similar bundles of practices are found to significantly raise math achievement in analyses for public schools in a field experiment in denver and program in chicago jel codes i21 i24 i28 j24

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

public sector performance measurement and stakeholder support abstract over the past several decades there has been dramatically increased attention paid to measuring the performance of public sector and nonprofit organizations in the united states and elsewhere recent research has indicated that public sector and nonprofit organizations are responsive to performance measurement in both productive and unproductive ways however it is not yet known how stakeholders respond to this measurement this paper makes use of a unique panel survey dataset of the population of elementary and middle schools in the state of florida to directly investigate this question we exploit the fact that florida changed its school grading system in 2002 and study the degree to which private contributions to schools are responsive to the information contained in school grades we find evidence that school grades can have substantial effects on a school s ability to obtain private contributions we also observe that schools serving different clienteles are treated differently in response to changes in school grades

individual teacher incentives and student performance this paper is the first to systematically document the relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement using the united states data we combine data from the national education longitudinal survey on schools students and their families with our own survey conducted in 2000 regarding the use of teacher incentives this survey on teacher incentives has unique data on frequency and magnitude of merit raises and bonuses teacher evaluation and teacher termination we find that test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance moreover the estimated relationship between the presence of merit pay in teacher compensation and student test scores is strongest in schools that may have the least parental oversight the association between teacher incentives and student performance could be due to better schools adopting teacher incentives or to teacher incentives eliciting more effort from teachers it is impossible to rule out the former explanation with our cross sectional data

institutional ownership and governance this paper describes different forms of ownership across countries and how these forms influence the way companies are governed in most stock markets in the world listed companies frequently have a controlling shareholder usually a family however japan the uk and to a lesser extent the us are exceptions in these three countries ownership is frequently highly fragmented where share stakes are held by different institutional owners including asset managers both active and passive and by shareholder activists the paper focuses in particular on the governance structure of different institutional shareholders how they engage with target firms and their effectiveness the paper concludes with recommendations for regulators to enhance different forms of ownership

village wide effects of agricultural biotechnology the case of bt cotton in india previous studies on impacts of agricultural biotechnology have mostly focused on direct effects we suggest an economy wide framework to analyze income distribution aspects more carefully for a village in india a micro social accounting matrix sam is developed and used to simulate the effects of bt cotton adoption overall the technology is employment generating although family labor in cotton production is saved while substantial benefits are observed for small and large farmers total household income effects are bigger for larger farms this is mostly due to differential opportunity incomes of saved family labor some research and policy implications are discussed

the economics of private equity funds this article analyzes the economics of the private equity industry using a novel model and dataset we obtain data from a large investor in private equity funds with detailed records on 238 funds raised between 1993 and 2006 we build a model to estimate the expected revenue to managers as a function of their investor contracts and we test how this estimated revenue varies across the characteristics of our sample funds among our sample funds about two thirds of expected revenue comes from fixed revenue components that are not sensitive to performance we find sharp differences between venture capital vc and buyout bo funds bo managers build on their prior experience by increasing the size of their funds faster than vc managers do this leads to significantly higher revenue per partner and per professional in later bo funds the results suggest that the bo business is more scalable than the vc business and that past success has a differential impact on the terms of their future funds jel g10 g20 g24

the effects of merit pay on teacher job satisfaction the purpose of this study is to determine if the existence of a district level merit pay system has any effects on teacher job satisfaction using a large sample of public school teachers from the year 2007 the results of this study suggest that teachers who work in districts that use a merit pay system are no less satisfied with their jobs than are other teachers these results are consistent for both an ordered probit model and a two stage analysis although the effect of merit pay on overall job satisfaction was insignificant teachers in merit pay districts were less enthusiastic did not think teaching was important and were more likely to leave for better pay however in examining a sample of teachers who worked only in merit pay districts it was found that teachers who received merit pay were more satisfied overall with their jobs than were teachers who did not receive merit pay

performance pay and teachers effort productivity and grading ethics this paper presents evidence about the effect of individual monetary incentives on english and math teachers in israel teachers were rewarded with cash bonuses for improving their students performance in high school matriculation exams the main identification strategy is based on measurement error in the assignment to treatment variable that produced a randomized treatment sample the incentives led to significant improvements in test taking rates conditional pass rates and mean test scores improvements were mediated through changes in teaching methods enhanced after school teaching and increased responsiveness to students needs no evidence was found of manipulation of test scores by teachers

systems of innovation theory and the changing architecture of agricultural research in africa abstract this paper examines the on going evolution of the organisational architecture of agricultural research in africa once considered a rural backwater populated by agronomists extension agents and farmers agricultural research is now being explicitly placed within global debates about innovation technology institutions and development this is reflected in a growing interest in the use of systems of innovation theory to both understand and reform innovation processes within agriculture the basic argument put forward in the paper is that the conception of a global agricultural research system and associated efforts to create a coordinated multi layered supra national research infrastructure are at odds with both the realities of research at national level and the bio physical and socio economic heterogeneity that characterises rural africa it is suggested that a less directive approach to support for agricultural research is required to allow national characteristics and differences to come to the fore and to give more room for the development of the all important demand side

the economics of biotechnology under ecosystem disruption abstract economic analysis of chemical pesticide use has shown that the interactions between plants pests damage control technology and state of the ecosystem are important variables to be considered hence a bio economic model was developed for the assessment of bt variety and pesticide based control strategies of the cotton bollworm in china the model simulates plant growth the dynamics of pest populations and of natural enemies the model predictions are used as major inputs for a stochastic micro level profit model of alternative control strategies results show that 1 productivity effects of bt varieties and pesticide use depend on the action of natural control agents and 2 the profitability of damage control measures increases with the severity of ecosystem disruption the findings highlight the importance of the choice of the counterfactual scenario in the assessment of the impact of agricultural biotechnology also some doubts are raised whether the high benefits of bt cotton varieties claimed by previous studies based on cross section comparisons are realistic

impact of bt cotton in china abstract a sample of 283 cotton farmers in northern china was surveyed in december 1999 farmers that used cotton engineered to produce the bacillus thuringiensis bt toxin substantially reduced the use of pesticide without reducing the output ha or quality of cotton this resulted in substantial economic benefits for small farmers consumers did not benefit directly farmers obtained the major share of benefits and because of weak intellectual property rights very little went back to government research institutes or foreign firms that developed these varieties farmers using bt cotton reported fewer pesticide poisonings than those using conventional cotton

the effect of household wealth on the adoption of improved maize varieties in zambia abstract production and price risks that could render input use unprofitable sometimes prevent rural households from benefiting from input technological change the household s ability to cope with such risks and hence benefit from input technological change is often positively related to its wealth or stock of productive assets empirical evidence however suggests a non linear relationship between wealth and adoption of new agricultural technologies so that within a rural community households on the lower wealth continuum behave differently from those on the higher level using farm level data collected from 300 randomly selected households in three districts of zambia in 2004 2005 crop season this paper first stratifies households into poorly and well endowed households based on their access to productive assets and estimates separate double hurdle models for the adoption of improved high yielding maize ihym varieties for each group the results show that factors influencing the adoption and use intensity of ihym varieties differ between the two groups this draws attention to the need for recommending wealth group specific interventions to increase the adoption and use intensity of such varieties and their subsequent impacts on food security and general livelihoods of the households the explicit testing for the possibility that differences in household wealth affect the way in which other variables influence adoption decisions is the paper s unique contribution to the adoption literature

if you pay peanuts do you get monkeys a cross country analysis of teacher pay and pupil performance why are teachers paid up to four times as much in some countries compared to others and does it matter specifically is the quality of teachers likely to be higher if they are paid higher up the income distribution in their own country and are pupil outcomes influenced by how well their teachers are paid this paper considers the determinants of teachers salaries across countries and examines the relationship between the real and relative level of teacher remuneration and the internationally comparable measured performance of secondary school pupils we use aggregate panel data on 39 countries published by the oecd to model this association our results suggest that recruiting higher ability individuals into teaching and permitting scope for quicker salary advancement will have a positive effect on pupil outcomes

on the adoption of genetically modified seeds in developing countries and the optimal types of government intervention given the proprietary nature of most genetically modified gm seed technologies the question arises as to how farmers in developing countries can gain proper access based on empirical observations a theoretical model is developed focusing on farmers adoption decisions in response to pricing strategies of a foreign monopolist and a domestic supplier of conventional seeds government interventions such as seed subsidies encouragement of r d and intellectual property rights ipr enforcement and their effects on gm coverage and national welfare are analyzed the possibility of the government obtaining a license to distribute gm seeds domestically through a transfer to the monopolist is also considered

bt cotton in india field trial results and economic projections abstract the performance of bt cotton in india is analyzed on the basis of field trial data from 2001 the amounts of pesticides applied during the trials were reduced to one third of what was used in conventional cotton while under severe pest pressure yield gains were 80 productivity effects are modeled econometrically with a damage control specification the first approval for the commercial cultivation of bt hybrids was given in 2002 by 2005 the technology is expected to cover one quarter of total indian cotton area medium term projections show sizeable welfare gains for the overall economy with farmers being the main beneficiaries

production risk pesticide use and gm crop technology in south africa technology involving genetic modification of crops has the potential to make a contribution to rural poverty reduction in many developing countries thus far pesticide producing bacillus thuringensis bt varieties of cotton have been the main gm crops under cultivation in developing nations several studies have evaluated the farm level performance of bt varieties in comparison to conventional ones by estimating production technology and have mostly found bt technology to be very successful in raising output and or reducing pesticide input however the production risk properties of this technology have not been studied although they are likely to be important to risk averse smallholders this study investigates the output risk aspects of bt technology by estimating two flexible risk production function models allowing technology to independently affect the mean and higher moments of output the first is the popular just pope model and the second is a more general damage control flexible risk mode

can gm technologies help the poor the impact of bt cotton in makhathini flats kwazulu natal abstract the results of a two year survey of smallholders in makhathini flats kwazulu natal show that farmers who adopted bt cotton in 1999 2000 benefited according to all the measures used higher yields and lower chemical costs outweighed higher seed costs giving higher gross margins these measures showed negative benefits in 1998 99 which conflicts with continued adoption but stochastic efficiency frontier estimation which takes account of the labor saved showed that adopters averaged 88 efficiency as compared with 66 for the nonadopters in 1999 2000 when late rains lowered yields the gap widened to 74 for adopters and 48 for nonadopters

agricultural biotechnology adoption in developing countries over the last ten years modern agricultural biotechnology has been adopted rapidly at the global level including in several developing countries this trend has been most apparent for genetically modified gm crops while the first gm crops were officially commercialized in the united states in 1995 in 2004 gm crops were already grown by more than 8 million farmers in seventeen countries on a total area of 81 million hectares james this is the fastest diffusion of any new crop technology in the history of humankind the most widely used gm technologies involve herbicide tolerance ht applied in soybean and canola and insect resistance based on genes isolated from bacillus thuringiensis bt applied in maize and cotton recent studies about the agronomic and economic impacts demonstrate that on average adopting farmers benefit from income increases through reduced pest control costs and higher effective yields carpenter et al traxler et al pray et al morse bennett and ismael thirtle et al qaim and zilberman qaim and de janvry 2005 qaim and traxler these studies even suggest that the farm level benefits tend to be bigger in developing than in developed countries

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

do schools matter for high math achievement evidence from the american mathematics competitions this paper uses data from the american mathematics competitions to examine the rates at which different high schools produce high achieving math students there are large differences in the frequency with which students from seemingly similar schools reach high achievement levels the distribution of unexplained school effects includes a thick tail of schools that produce many more high achieving students than is typical several additional analyses suggest that the differences are not primarily due to unobserved differences in student characteristics the differences are persistent across time suggesting that differences in the effectiveness of educational programs are not primarily due to direct peer effects

what do parents value in education an empirical investigation of parents revealed preferences for teachers this paper examines revealed preferences of parents for their children s education using parent requests for individual elementary school teachers and information on teacher attributes including principal reports of teacher characteristics that are typically unobservable on average parents strongly prefer teachers whom principals describe as good at promoting student satisfaction though they also value teacher ability to raise academic achievement these aggregate effects mask striking differences across schools families in higher poverty schools strongly value student achievement and appear indifferent to the principal s report of a teacher s ability to promote student satisfaction the results are reversed for families in wealthier schools

plant breeding and poverty can transgenic seeds replicate the green revolution as a source of gains for the poor 1 abstract improved farm technology helps all main groups of the poor small farmers farmworkers other low wage labour when it raises labour value productivity but raises land and or water value productivity faster and cuts staples prices but raises smallholders total factor productivity faster from 1965 the green revolution walked these two tightropes largely by luck though targeting bigger piles of rice and wheat it cut poverty through consumption nutrition smallholder income employment risk reduction and ecological sustainability yet large areas were left out and from 1985 progress slowed in the new environment for research and agriculture how can transgenics revive and spread poverty reduction what has been the evidence so far what determines whether new varieties have traits conducive to poverty reduction who owns the research or what crop science is

independent schools and long run educational outcomes evidence from sweden s large scale voucher reform this paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independentschool sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in sweden in 1992 starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists the degree of independent schools has developed very differently across municipalities over time as a result of this reform we regress the change in educational performance outcomes on the increase in the share of independent school students between swedish municipalities we find that an increase in the share of independent school students improves average performance at the end of compulsory school as well as long run educational outcomes we show that these effects are very robust with respect to a number of potential issues such as grade inflation and pre reform trends however for most outcomes we do not detect positive and statistically significant effects until approximately a decade after the reform this is notable but not surprising given that it took time for independent schools to become more than a marginal phenomenon in sweden we do not find positive effects on school expenditures hence the educational performance effects are interpretable as positive effects on school productivity we further find that the average effects primarily are due to external effects e g school competition and not that independent school students gain significantly more than public school students

accountability and flexibility in public schools evidence from boston s charters and pilots charter schools are publicly funded but operate outside the regulatory framework and collective bargaining agreements characteristic of traditional public schools in return for this freedom charter schools are subject to heightened accountability this paper estimates the impact of charter school attendance on student achievement using data from boston where charter schools enroll a growing share of students we also evaluate an alternative to the charter model boston s pilot schools these schools have some of the independence of charter schools but operate within the school district face little risk of closure and are covered by many of same collective bargaining provisions as traditional public schools estimates using student assignment lotteries show large and significant test score gains for charter lottery winners in middle and high school in contrast lottery based estimates for pilot schools are small and mostly insignificant the large positive lottery based estimates for charter schools are similar to estimates constructed using statistical controls in the same sample but larger than those using statistical controls in a wider sample of schools the latter are still substantial however the estimates for pilot schools are smaller and more variable than those for charters with some significant negative effects

teacher mobility and merit pay evidence from a voluntary public award program abstract this paper analyzes the effect on teacher mobility of a program that rewards excellence in teaching practices in chile successful applicants receive a 6 annual wage increase for up to 10 years and an award that publicly recognizes their excellence the paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of the public merit award the program does not alter transitions out of teaching however it increases the mobility of awardees within the school system this is consistent with the program providing a credible public signal of teacher quality

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

global water crisis and future food security in an era of climate change food policy should serve humanity by advancing the humane goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger however these goals have recently been challenged by emerging forces including climate change water scarcity the energy crisis as well as the credit crisis this paper analyses the overall role of these forces and population growth in redefining global food security specifically global water supply and demand as well as the linkages between water supply and food security are examined the analysis reveals that the water for food security situation is intricate and might get daunting if no action is taken investments are needed today for enhancing future food security this requires action on several fronts including tackling climate change preserving land and conserving water reducing the energy footprint in food systems developing and adopting climate resilient varieties modernising irrigation infrastructure shoring up domestic food supplies reforming international food trade and responding to other global challenges

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

structural estimation of a model of school choices the boston mechanism vs its alternatives we model household choice of schools under the boston mechanism bm and develop a new method applicable to a broad class of mechanisms to fully solve the choice problem even if it is infeasible

the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey this brief summarizes the updates from the 2014 paper entitled the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey conducted between between 2010 and 2011 in turkey a randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large scale active labor market policy turkey s vocational training programs for the unemployed a detailed follow up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity the average impact of training on employment is positive but close to zero and statistically insignificant which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected over the first year after training the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers however longer term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated

it s the market the broad based rise in the return to top talent abstract one explanation that has been proposed for rising inequality is that technical change allows highly talented individuals or superstars to manage or perform on a larger scale applying their talent to greater pools of resources and reaching larger numbers of people thus becoming more productive and higher paid others argue that managerial power has increased in a way that allows those at the top to receive higher pay that social norms against higher pay levels have broken down or that tax policy affects the distribution of surpluses between employers and employees we offer evidence bearing on the different theories explaining the rise in inequality in the united states over recent decades first we look the increase in pay at the highest income levels across occupations we consider the income share of the top 1 percent over time and we turn to evidence on inequality of wealth at the top in looking at the wealthiest americans we find that those in the forbes 400 are less likely to have

consumer willingness to pay for genetically modified food in kenya genetically modified gm crops are popular in many regions of the world but their deployment in africa is hindered by safety concerns and regulatory issues although the continent is in dire need of boosting its food production although consumers acceptance of gm food has been analyzed in many continents no such studies have been conducted in africa therefore a survey of 604 consumers was conducted in nairobi kenya in 2003 to gauge consumers awareness of gm crops their willingness to pay wtp for gm food and the factors that influence their wtp consumers knowledge of gm crops was limited and only 38 of the 604 respondents were aware of gm crops people in higher education and income groups were more aware than others regardless people were generally appreciative of the technology and a large majority 68 would be willing to buy gm maize meal at the same price as their favorite brand consumers were however concerned about possible side effects especially on the environment and biodiversity wtp was estimated using a double bounded dichotomous choice model and the mean wtp was found to be 13 8 higher than the average price of non gm maize meal perceptions of health risk and ethical and equity concerns had a negative influence on the likelihood of purchasing gm maize meal whereas trust in government to ensure food quality had a positive influence on wtp people with at least some secondary education and those in the high income category were more likely to purchase gm maize meal at the same price the study concludes that because awareness is still low appropriate communications are needed to involve the consumer in the debate consumers acceptance in this study was high but the research needs to be expanded to rural areas where most consumers live and other survey methods need to be explored