Minimum dropout age (MDA) laws have been touted as effective policies to bring dropouts off streets and into classrooms. One question to better understand the costs and benefits of these laws is: to what extent do MDA laws displace crime from streets to schools? This research expands the...

Most researchers find that the non-teaching wage has a significant effect on teacher attrition. Surprisingly no study that estimates this effect actually uses former teachers? wages. The use of aggregate wage data can potentially cause upward bias coefficients due to selection issues. Using...

The Internet is an efficient information search tool whose growth may have caused a structural change in information search and acquisition behaviors. This study investigates the effects of growing Internet accessibility on these behaviors. Using U.S. public library circulation counts to...

Extensive literature has shown that student attainment outcomes are affected by schools’ decisions to alter student-to-teacher ratios and overall teacher aptitude levels. However, these findings provide little information to policymakers and school administrators for understanding which...

The paper addresses the two-fold rise in teacher-student ratio in the American K-12 school system in the post-World War II period accompanied by the evidence of a decline in the relative quality of teachers. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium framework for analyzing the teacher...

This study investigates how salary rigidities affect teacher quality across teaching subjects and high schools and whether high quality teachers can be compensated sufficiently to attract them into unfavorable schools. For identification, we rely on idiosyncratic variations in compensation...