Gender segregation in the labor market may be explained by women’s reluctance to choose technical occupations, although the foundations for career choices are certainly laid earlier, during education. Educational experts claim that female students are doing better in math and science and are more likely to choose those subjects if they are in single-sex classes. Possible explanations are the la...

E cient school assignments are made by allowing students to trade their priorities. However, a school board typically gives the highest priority at a school to students who have a sibling attending the school, and a school board might not want to allow a student to trade such a school-speci c priority. This paper addresses the following question: is it possible to design a strategy-proof tradin...

This paper analyses the e¤ects of public funding of higher education on the welfare of the di¤erent agents. It takes into account the hierarchical nature of the educational system and also the fact that parents always have the possibility to complement basic public education with private expenditures in individual tutoring. It is obtained that although public funding implies a larger access to ...

Despite the growing prominence of theoretical analysis of inequality of opportunity over the past twenty years, empirical work towards the normative evaluation of real-world policies has been minimal. This paper seeks to address this issue. It proposes a normative framework to model the influence of educational policy on health outcomes, grounded in Roemer’s model of equality of opportunity. We...

This paper develops a dynamic discrete choice model of schooling and occupational choices that incorporates time-varying personality traits, as measured by the so-called “Big Five" traits. The model is estimated using the HILDA longitudinal dataset from Australia. Personality traits are found to play a critical role in explaining education and occupation choices over the lifecycle. The traits e...

We explore the role of language policy choices as a source of growth and development of nation states. First in a cross-country framework we document that choosing as official a language that is distant from the ones spoken by the local population is negatively correlated with the level of income per capita. This effect is economically meaningful and robust to a wide variety of controls such as...

School and Drugs: Closing the Gap – Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the US We present evidence on how The Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP hereafter) worked in the US. While the program was regarded as successful in the short-term, in the long-run its educational results were modest and its effects on risky behaviors detrimental. Exploiting control group’s self-reported drug use while in sc...

The recent federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, requires states to test students in grades 3 to 8 each year and to judge school performance on the basis of these test scores. While intended to maximize student learning, there is little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of such policies. This study examines the impact of an accountability policy implemented in the Chicago Publi...

This paper provides evidence against the argument that the rich prevent the poor from obtaining public education in unequal developing democracies. In Brazilian municipalities with low median incomes, voters are significantly less likely to reelect incumbent candidates from parties that increased the number of local public primary schools during their terms. This is not true for municipalities ...

This paper uses data from the implementation of a district-wide public school choice plan in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to estimate preferences for school characteristics and examine the ir implications for the local educational market. We use parental rankings of their top three choices of schools matched with student demographic and test score data to estimate a mixed-logit discrete c...