We analyze all but a few of the 47 charter schools operating in New York City in 2005-06. The schools tend locate in disadvantaged neighborhoods and serve students who are substantially poorer than the average public school student in New York City. The schools also attract black applicants to...

Rothstein has produced two comments, Rothstein (2003) and Rothstein (2004), on Hoxby "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers," American Economic Review, 2000. In this paper, I discuss every claim of any importance in the comments. I show that every claim is wrong. I...

I consider how online postsecondary education, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), might fit into economically sustainable models of postsecondary education. I contrast nonselective postsecondary education (NSPE)in which institutions sell fairly standardized educational services in...

I propose a positive model of the university that generates many apparently peculiar features of universities such as endowments and tuition subsidies. The model proposes a specific objective function: a university maximizes its contribution to the intellectual capital of society, valued at...

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that...

A school that is more productive is one that produces higher achievement in its pupils for each dollar it spends. In this paper, I comprehensively review how school choice might affect productivity. I begin by describing the importance of school productivity, then explain the economic logic that...

Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or...

The Department of Justice's (DOJ's) investigation of private colleges for price-fixing caused the Overlap' group of colleges to discontinue their meetings. DOJ alleged that the meetings enabled the colleges to collude on higher tuition and increase their tuition revenue. The colleges claimed...

I construct an agency model of local public goods producers with special reference to public schools. The model assumes that households make Tiebout choices among jurisdictions, but it has more realistic assumptions about information and the cost of residential mobility. I examine producers'...