We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems—how schools use financial rewards. For two years, California's accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. Qualifying schools...

We use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems—how schools use financial rewards. For two years, California's accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores. Qualifying schools...

"Accountability mandates" -- the explicit linking of school funding, resources, and autonomy to student performance on standardized exams -- have proliferated in the last 10 years. In this paper, we examine California's accountability system, which for several years financially rewarded schools...

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is certainly popular. Indeed, my search for something comparable took me back more than 120 years. Even with the uncertainty about what constitutes a best seller, it is clear that the...

This paper documents the allocation of skills across cities and estimates the impact of agglomeration on the hedonic prices of worker skills. We find that large cities are more skilled than are small cities, but only to a modest degree. We also show that the increase in productivity associated...

This study examines how the returns to wages of early work and schooling experiences changed for young men and women in the United States over the latter half of the twentieth century. Our analysis focuses on the experi¬ences of young men and women from two different birth cohorts—one group...

This paper documents the widely perceived but little investigated notion that teachers today are less qualified than they once were. Using standardized test scores, undergraduate institution selectivity, and positive assortative mating characteristics as measures of quality, evidence of a marked...