For whom and under what conditions do incentives work in education? In the context of a summer reading program called Project READS, we test whether responsiveness to incentives is positively or negatively related to the student's baseline level of motivation to read. Elementary school students...

We study how reported sexism in the population affects American women. Fixed-effects and TSLS estimates show that higher prevailing sexism where she was born (background sexism) and where she currently lives (residential sexism) both lower a woman's wages, labor force participation and ages of...

There is growing concern that it is too difficult or costly to substantially improve the academic skills of children who are behind in school once they reach adolescence. But perhaps what we have tried in the past relies on the wrong interventions, failing to account for challenges like the...

In response to budget problems, many urban school systems reduced resources for getting students to come to school, like truancy officers. Chicago, for instance, went from 150 truancy officers down to, in 1991, a total of zero. Is that a good idea? We explore here the effects of increased...

High-dosage tutoring is an effective way to improve student learning (Nickow et al., 2024; Guryan et al., 2023). Finding ways to deliver high-dosage tutoring at large scale remains a challenge. Two primary challenges to scaling are cost and staffing. One possible solution is to reduce costs by...

We revisit the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic to examine whether restaurant foot traffic reveals changes in sentiment towards ethnic groups. Our findings show reduced demand for dining at Asian restaurants located inside Asian enclaves, while outside enclaves, the decline in visits to...

There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is...

In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that separate schools for black and white children were 'inherently unequal.' This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years in fact benefited the black students for whom the plans were designed. Analysis of data from...

The paper studies a typical state-level education finance equalization scheme, and considers two questions. First, what fraction of state education aid is spent on schools? And second, does increased educational funding for historically low-spending districts lead to improved student...

There is a large body of literature in both psychology and economics documenting mistaken perceptions of randomness. In this paper we demonstrate that people appear to believe that "lightning will strike twice" when it comes to lottery jackpots. First, we show that in the week following the sale...