Schelling ("Dynamic Models of Segregation," Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971), 143-186) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a "tipping point," all the whites leave. We use regression...

Growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of U.S. students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize (or fire) bad ones. The leading method for assessing teacher quality is "value added" modeling (VAM), which decomposes students' test scores into components attributed to...

Despite extensive public infrastructure spending, surprisingly little is known about its economic return. In this paper, we estimate the value of school facility investments using housing markets: standard models of local public goods imply that school districts should spend up to the point...

There is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a trade-off between child quantity and quality within a family. However, there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory. Using a rich data set on the entire population of Norway over an extended period of time, we examine...

The evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools. Given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes, I turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality....