This article examines the effect of Catholic secondary schooling on high school graduation rates, college graduation rates, and future wages. The article introduces new measures of access to Catholic schools that serve as potential instruments for Catholic school attendance. Catholic secondary...

The author summarizes the literature on the relative performance of public and private schools over the past decade and assesses what we have learned from these studies. Although many questions remain unanswered, the author concludes that private schooling--in particular, Catholic schooling--can...

The model of job search involves both employer matches and career matches and incorporates an asymmetry in the search technology. Workers may change employers without changing careers, but cannot search over possible lines of work while working for one employer. The optimal policy implies a...

Many test-based accountability systems, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), place great weight on the numbers of students who score at or above specified proficiency levels in various subjects. Accountability systems based on these metrics often provide incentives for teachers...

The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal for principals and teachers. Further, the...

All data sources indicate that black-white skill gaps diminished over most of the 20th century, but black-white skill gaps as measured by test scores among youth and educational attainment among young adults have remained constant or increased in absolute value since the late 1980s. I examine...

We propose an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets. Under certain conditions, this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort. Moreover, because this scheme employs only ordinal information, it...

The No Child Left Behind law is flawed for many reasons, but the most important is that it is built around proficiency targets. Proficiency rates are not useful metrics of school performance because universal proficiency is not a socially efficient goal for principals and teachers. Further, the...