The control group of families with female heads, from the Denver Income Maintenance Experiment, is utilized in this analysis of AFDC turnover. This study uses event history techniques, a methodology that is more appropriate for exploring welfare dynamics than the logit approach of earlier work....

We estimate the relationship between teenage childbearing, human capital investment, and wages in early adulthood, using a sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a large set of potential instruments for fertility-principally state and county-level indicators of the...

The proportion of students taking a first algebra course in middle school has doubled over the past generation and there have been calls to make eighth grade algebra universal. We use significant policy shifts in the timing of algebra in two large North Carolina districts to infer the impact of...

Administrative data on fifth grade students in North Carolina shows that more highly qualified teachers tend to be matched with more advantaged students, both across schools and in many cases within them. This matching biases estimates of the relationship between teacher characteristics and...

Using data on applicants to three selective universities, we analyze a college applicant’s decision to retake the SAT. We model this decision as an optimal search problem, and use the model to assess the impact of college admissions policies on retaking behavior. The most common test score...

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials, particularly licensure and certification, affects student achievement in...