We investigate short and long-term effects of early childhood education using variation created by a unique policy experiment in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings imply starting Kindergarten one year late substantially reduces the probability of repeating the third grade, and meaningfully...

We investigate short and long-term effects of early childhood education using variation created by a policy experiment in British Columbia, Canada. Our findings imply being in kindergarten longer increases the probability of repeating the third grade, and decreases tenth grade math and reading...

We explore the effects of local ethnic and religious diversity on individual donations to private charities. Using 10-year neighborhood-level panels derived from personal tax records in Canada, we find that diversity has a detrimental effect on charitable donations. A 10 percentage point...

Using 10-year neighborhood-level panels derived from personal tax records in Canada, we find that local ethnic and religious diversity are inversely related to charitable donations. A 10 percentage point increase in ethnic diversity is associated with a 14% reduction in donations. The same...

Do households react to changes in the distribution of income in their localities by changing their charitable giving? The theoretical prediction of the effects of income inequality on giving is unclear. We study how changes in income inequality measured at the neighbourhood and municipality...

As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as hiring and firing of teachers, monitoring instruction and maintaining student discipline, among many others. We measure the effect of individual principals on gains in math and reading achievement...

Many studies examine the importance of teachers in students' learning, but few exist on the contribution of principals. We measure the effect of principals on gains in primary test scores in North Carolina and estimate the standard deviation of principals' value added to be 0.12 -0.17. We find...

Evidence supports the contention that humans find it costly to carry out some sorts of strategies. Such costs are unlikely to be observed directly, but various models have been proposed to represent them. We discuss a method for testing the empirical worth of these models.

We estimate the effect of information about school achievement that is disseminated to the public through websites and school `report cards' on school choice decisions. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when public information reveals poor school-level performance. Some...