Ranking Up by Moving Out: The Effect of the Texas Top 10% Plan on Property Values Texas engaged in a large-scale policy experiment when it instituted the Top 10% Plan. This policy guarantees automatic admission to their state university of choice for all high school seniors who graduate in the top decile of their high school class. We find evidence that households reacted strategically to this ...

What accounts for economic growth and prosperity? What stands at their origin? Recent literature typically searches for single univariate causal explanations: institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a first theoretical modeling of the interaction between different possible explanations for growth and prosperity (in particular, between culture and instit...

By the time children leave primary school there is a large socio-economic gap in their reading proficiency. There are a number of potential explanations for this socio-economic gap and in this paper we investigate the role of three particular genes and geneenvironment interactions in determining children’s reading skills, using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) datase...

The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-b...

We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi’s epoch and 1879, Einstein’s birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive biographical tool. Our main contribution is fourfold. First, we show, using for the first time a worldwide, ...

Both the quality and quantity of human capital are important for growth. Although the quality aspects of human capital may have greater potential in explaining growth, given that the quantity effects of human capital have been found to be ambiguous, they have long been ignored in empirical growth literature. This paper empirically tests the joint effects of both the quantity and quality of huma...

This paper provides an empirical examination of the economic impact of spectator sports on local economies. Confirming the results of other ex post analyses of sports in general, this paper finds no statistically significant evidence that college football games in particular contribute positively to a host’s economy. Our analysis from 1970-2004 of 63 metropolitan areas that play host to big-tim...

The interaction between investment in children’s education and parental fertility is crucial in recent theories of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper contributes to the literature on the child quantity-quality trade-off with new countylevel evidence for Prussia in 1816, several decades before the demographic transition. We find a significant negative...

In this volume, Betts and Shkolnik [Betts, J. R., & Shkolnik, J. L. (1999) The effects of ability grouping on student math achievement and resource allocation in secondary schools. Economics of Education Review, 19, 1–15] argue that studies that compare students in tracked versus untracked classes overestimate the impact of tracking on student achievement by not adequately controlling for stude...

The paper considers the results of metallographic studies and tribotechnical tests samples 9CrSi tool steel multicomponent coatings obtained by laser surfacing with addition ultrafine titanium carbide particles into charge. As an additional parameter, transverse high-frequency oscillations beam along normal to velocity vector were used. Tribotechnical carried out according scheme “the plane is ...