Using data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census, I find little support for the opt-out revolution - highly educated women, relative to their less educated counterparts, are exiting the labor force to care for their families at higher rates today than in earlier time periods - if one focuses...

Antecol (2000) finds that culture plays a role in explaining inter-ethnic variation in the gender gap in labor force participation rates (LFPR). However, Antecol (2000) was unable to determine what the components of culture, such as differences in preferences regarding family structure and...

After forty years of school consolidation, the preponderance of the evidence, including the results presented in this paper, suggest that the race to reap returns to scale and specialization in education may have come at a high price. This paper uses newly available STAR test score data from...

Most studies of the deterrence effect of incarceration treat a year in prison as having the same deterrence effect regardless of the conditions of incarceration. In contrast, we estimate both the impact of custody rate and prison location changes on female crime rates. We take advantage of the...

While the Serrano v Priest decisions and Proposition 13 effectively rendered California school district budgets exogenous, intra-district resource allocation remains largely at the discretion of school district administrations. As a result, Serrano v Priest and Proposition 13 alleviate concerns...

Using quantile regressions, this paper provides evidence that the relationship between school quality and wages varies across points in the conditional wage distribution and educational attainment levels. Although smaller classes generally have a positive return for individuals at high...

Needs based capitation models have been suggested as an alternative to funding methods based on historical utilization patterns. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) applied in conjuction with an age/gender adjustment is the most widely adopted measure of relative need. This paper addresses a...

Although the United States provides unpaid maternity and family leave to qualifying workers, it is the only OECD country without a national paid leave policy, making wage replacement a pivotal issue under debate. We use ten years of linked administrative data from California together with a...