Some studies suggest that instructors' looks are important determinants of their Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) results. Yet the studies examining this proposition leave out many independent variables that have been found to be important determinants of SETs in the SET literature. This...

Since the inception of charter schools over a decade ago, policymakers have wanted to know how charter schools are performing. This is difficult to answer because there is no single charter school approach to educating students. By design, charter schools have innovative and distinctive...

Over the last 30 years, the tenet of promoting self-sufficiency through work has become one of the primary objectives of many social welfare policies in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author asks if a mother's work hours influence her daughter's teenage...

Voluntary environmental programs are codes of progressive environmental conduct that firms pledge to adopt. This paper investigates whether ISO 14001, a voluntary program with a weak sword-a weak monitoring and sanctioning mechanism-can mitigate shirking and improve participants' environmental...

We use data from a sample of applicants to a national means-tested school voucher program and a national sample of the population eligible for the program to evaluate the factors leading families to use school vouchers. Our analysis divides the process of voucher usage into two distinct stages:...

A common argument in support of work-based welfare reform is that exposure to work will lead welfare recipients to revise their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the analytical and empirical basis for this argument. The difficulty in testing the...