Nearly all school-age children in the United States attend kindergarten, and approximately three-quarters of kindergarten students are in full-day classrooms. While there have been dramatic increases in provision of and participation in full-day kindergarten, there is little evidence on the impact and cost-effectiveness of such programs and policies, particularly as compared to other types of i...

This paper examines the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement using school admissions lotteries in China. Although lottery winners were more likely to attend magnet schools that appear better in many dimensions, including peer achievement, we find little evidence that winning a lottery improved students’performance on the High School Entrance Exam or their enrollment status...

Evaluating a bilingual education program in Spain: the impact beyond foreign language learning* We evaluate a program that introduced bilingual education in English and Spanish in primary education in some public schools of the Madrid region in 2004. Under this program students not only study English as a foreign language but also some subjects (at least Science, History and Geography) are taug...

This paper analyzes how public school teachers make educational decisions and the effects that these decisions have on their future labor market outcomes. In particular, it looks at the impact of college options and characteristics on the recent increase in the incidence of master’s degrees for employed teachers. Teachers’ education and career decisions are modeled via a dynamic framework in th...

Decentralization of the delivery of public services provision is an important governance reform recently witnessed in many developing countries. Public education has been one of the key public services devolved to lower level governments. This paper uses an exclusive and rich longitudinal data on primary schools to evaluate the e¤ects of the decentralization reform implemented on the State of S...

I present a generalization to the standard career concerns model and apply it to the public teacher labor market. In particular, this model provides three testable hypotheses: optimal teacher effort levels decline with experience all things equal, optimal effort declines with tenure at a particular school, and teachers shirk as incentives collapse at the end of a teacher’s career or tenure. Usi...

Article history: Received 25 June 2012 Received in revised form 14 January 2013 Accepted 14 January 2013 Available online 22 January 2013 The rapid expansion of enrollment capacity in China's colleges since the late 1990s has come at the price of high tuition hikes. China's government has put forth financial aid programs to enable poor students to access higher education. Although studies have ...

Endogenous Indoctrination: Occupational Choice, the Evolution of Beliefs, and the Political Economy of Reform Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conf...

P roductivity promotion has received a key attention in contemporary macroeconomic analysis. Productivity of labor driven, in particular, by human capital (i.e. health and education), is seen vitally more important. Labor qualities in terms of health and education (treated as flow and stock variables), have a bearing on labor productivity. The main objective of this paper is to ident...

In New Zealand, the primary means of addressing the disparities that exist in educational outcomes by socio-economic status of students is the “decile” funding system. The country’s Ministry of Education uses census data on five socio-economic deprivation factors for all households containing school-aged children in the meshblocks of the children attending each public or publicintegrated school...