JEL Classification Code(s): J 31, J 71) "Perceptions of Discrimination, Effort to Obtain Psychological Balance, and Relative Wages: Can We Infer a Happiness Gradient?" There is a substantial literature that finds a linkage between happiness and relative economic well being as measured by earnings or wages. There is also a well documented racial gap in wages. One explanation for this is disparat...

Since the Coleman Report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the United States. To study the effect of these school finance reform–induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcom...

A student’s peers are often thought to influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools (“sorting”) in a community will amplify existing inequalities. This paper explores the relationship between the degree of sorting across schools within a community and educational inequality as measured by the variance of standa...

How Important Is Homeland Education for Refugees’ Economic Position in The Netherlands? We use data on refugees admitted to the Netherlands that include registration of education in their homeland by immigration officers. Such data are seldom available. We investigate the quality and reliability of the registrations and then use them to assess effects on refugees’ economic position during the f...

This paper investigates the Becker-Woessmann (2009) argument that Protestants were more prosperous in nineteenth-century Prussia because they were more literate, a version of the Weber thesis, and shows that it cannot be sustained. The econometric analysis on which Becker and Woessman based their argument is fundamentally flawed, because their instrumental variable does not satisfy the exclusio...

The size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper, using a model of children’s heightfor-age in Papua New Guinea. This externality appears to be large. These results support the use of a new measure of literacy, developed by Basu and Foster (1998) to take account of the gains when illit...

It is well known that the widely-used Boston mechanism for allocating students to schools is not strategy-proof. An observation shows that relaxing the solution concept to dominance solvability could allow the Boston mechanism to achieve a desirable outcome. I define the acyclic priority structure of schools and find that the Boston mechanism is dominancesolvable if and only if the priority str...

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage registers show an important increase in literacy; historians measure an acceleration of economic growth. W...

This paper evaluates a school reform in Bavaria that moved the timing of tracking in lowand middle-track schools from grade 6 to grade 4; students in high-track schools were not affected. To eliminate state-specific and school-type-specific shocks, I estimate a triple-differences model using three PISA waves. The results indicate that the reform reduced the performance of 15-year-old students b...

Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the impact of Ramadan on educational outcomes of Muslim students living in a non-Muslim country. For identification we exploit the fact that the number of Ramadan weeks during the course that we study, varies from year to year, ranging from zero to four. Our main finding is that Ramadan observance has a negative impact on performance; one...