United States public schools in the first decade of the twenty-first century are faced with increasing demands for improving performance; simultaneously, government budgets are stagnant or shrinking. Thus it is particularly important to consider ways in which schools and school districts can use...

An extensive literature finds that, while teachers vary considerably in initial quality, there are limited teacher quality dynamics: except for the first few years of teaching, teacher quality does not improve over the course of a teacher’s career. This study evaluates the importance of...

This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at...

We use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate preferences for workplace attributes and quantify how much these preferences influence pre-labor-market human capital investments. This method robustly identifies preferences for various job attributes, free from omitted variable bias and free...

In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor structure, we provide new identification results...

The growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother's absence from home on child outcomes. Recent data show that mother's time spent with children has declined in the last decade, while the indicators of...

This paper uses a rich Norwegian dataset to re-examine the causal relationship between family income and child outcomes. Motivated by theoretical predictions and OLS results that suggest a nonlinear relationship, we depart from previous studies in allowing the marginal effects on children's...

Many empirical studies specify outcomes as a linear function of endogenous regressors when conducting instrumental variable (IV) estimation. We show that tests for treatment effects, selection bias, and treatment effect heterogeneity are biased if the true relationship is non-linear. These...

This paper combines multiple sources of information on early childhood development in a unified model for analysis of a wide range of early childhood policy interventions. We develop a model of child care in which households decide both the quantities and qualities of maternal and non-maternal...

This paper uses a rich Norwegian dataset to re-examine the causal relationship between family income and child outcomes. Motivated by theoretical predictions and OLS results that suggest a nonlinear relationship, we depart from previous studies in allowing the marginal effects on children’s...