The following is a model of psychological contracting with unmonitorable performance, implicit o¤ers, and screening for non-performance by the announcement of the expectation of performance. It is motivated by the $250 billion prescription drug industry, which spends $19 billion per year on marketing to US doctors, mostly on ‘gifts’, and often, as at Yale, with no monitoring for reciprocation. ...

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...

Immigration and the Political Economy of Public Education: Recent Perspectives This paper reviews the recent literature on the effects of immigration on the public education of the host country, emphasizing the political economy implications. In particular, we are interested on what happens to enrollment in public schools and the quality of education in these schools. Our review of the literatu...

We determine the optical luminosity function of virialized systems over the full range of density enhancements, from single galaxies to clusters of galaxies. The analysis is based on galaxy systems identified from the Nearby Optical Galaxy (NOG) sample, which is the largest, all-sky catalog of objectivelyidentified bound objects presently available. We find that the B-band luminosity function o...

The L1 stalk is a key mobile element of the large ribosomal subunit which interacts with tRNA during translocation. Here, we investigate the structure and mechanical properties of the rRNA H76/H75/H79 three-way junction at the base of the L1 stalk from four different prokaryotic organisms. We propose a coarse-grained elastic model and parameterize it using large-scale atomistic molecular dynami...

This paper uses a regression discontinuity model to examine the effects on kindergarten entrance assessments of the Kalamazoo County Ready 4s (KC Ready 4s) program, a half-day pre-K program for four-year-olds in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. The results are based on test scores and other characteristics of up to 220 children participating in KC Ready 4s, with data coming from both 2011–2012 and 2...

We use SDSS-DR4 photometric and spectroscopic data out to redshift z ∼ 0.1 combined with ROSAT All Sky Survey X-ray data to produce a sample of twenty-five fossil groups (FGs), defined as bound systems dominated by a single, luminous elliptical galaxy with extended X-ray emission. We examine possible biases introduced by varying the parameters used to define the sample and the main pitfalls are...

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...

Targeting Non-Cognitive Skills to Improve Cognitive Outcomes: Evidence from a Remedial Education Intervention A growing body of research highlights the importance of non-cognitive skills as determinants of young people’s cognitive outcomes at school. However, little evidence exists about the effects of policies that specifically target students’ non-cognitive skills as a way to improve educatio...

Incentive design involves a tradeoff between motivating agents and distorting their efforts; for many tasks the distortions are such that flat rewards may be optimal. Yet organizations of all types from school boards to the FBI increasingly utilize rewards based on observable performance metrics. We describe the effects of one such attempt, implemented in 2004, to motivate Chinese bureaucrats t...