In this article, the authors illustrate how incentives can improve student performance in introductory economics courses. They implemented a policy experiment in a large introductory economics class in which they reminded students who scored below an announced cutoff score on the midterm exam...

How class attendance influences students' performance remains unclear. Specifically, do students learn more <italic>in class</italic> if they attend more classes, or does class attendance create incentives for students to study harder <italic>outside class</italic>? To better understand this relationship, we designed an...

The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They...

This paper identifies problems associated with the current empirical measurement of ethnic diversity in economic development literature. An expanded index of ethnic diversity is proposed to include variables such as religion and race, and the results are compared to the prevailing index utilized...

GMM-based Wald tests tend to overreject when used for small samples, mainly due to inaccurate estimation of the weighting matrix. This article proposes applying the shrinkage method to address this problem. Using a possibly-misspecified factor model, the shrinkage method can provide a good...

In 2003, China launched a new health insurance system - the New Cooperative Medicine Scheme (NCMS) in its rural areas, where more than 87 percent of China’ rural residents were not covered by any health insurance programs. By the end of 2009, the NCMS had expanded to cover 95 percent of...

This paper investigates the determinants of academic achievement in basic education (grade 1-9) for a sample of children (aged 9-12 in 2000) from rural China. A set of instrumental variable generated by the Great Famine in China, 1958-1961, is used to instrument an error-ridden measure of child...