The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal for principals and teachers. Further, the...

Medical care at the end of life, estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. It seems generally agreed upon that medical resources are being wasted on...

We analyze how changes in government policy affect stock prices. Our general equilibrium model features uncertainty about government policy and a government that has both economic and non-economic motives. The government tends to change its policy after performance downturns in the private...

The last forty years have witnessed a remarkable boom in higher education around the world. Importantly, the boom in higher education has been concentrated among women, such that today in most higher-income countries, and many lower-income countries, more women than men attend and complete...

We recover prices of dividend strips on the aggregate stock market using data from derivatives markets. The price of a k-year dividend strip is the present value of the dividend paid in k years. The value of the stock market is the sum of all dividend strip prices across maturities. We study the...

This paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across family types, contrast these trends for several different income and consumption measures of poverty, and...

Over the last decades, large labor intensive countries, like China, have played a growing role in world trade. Using the factor proportions theory, this paper investigates the dynamic effects of economic growth consequent to international trade between countries with different factor...

We characterize the Laffer curves for labor taxation and capital income taxation quantitatively for the US, the EU-14 and individual European countries by comparing the balanced growth paths of a neoclassical growth model featuring â€constant Frisch elasticity†(CFE) preferences. We...

This paper provides a model of the view that the 2008 financial crisis is reminiscent of a bank run, focusing on six stylized key features. In particular, core financial institutions have invested their funds in asset-backed securities rather than committed to long-term projects: in distress,...