We study the effects of various types of education and training on the productivity of teachers in promoting student achievement. Previous studies on the subject have been hampered by inadequate ...measures of teacher training and difficulties in addressing the non-random selection of teachers to students and of teachers to training. We address these issues by estimating models that include detailed measures of pre-service and in-service training, a rich set of time-varying covariates, and student, teacher, and school fixed effects. We find that elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience (informal on-the-job training). The largest gains from experience occur in the first few years, but we find continuing gains beyond the first five years of a teacher's career. In contrast, we do not find a consistent relationship between formal professional development training and teacher productivity. However, this may be partly driven by estimation issues as we find more significant positive effects of formal training in the subject-grade combination where estimates should be most precise (middle school math). There is no evidence that teachers' pre-service (undergraduate) training or college entrance exam scores are related to productivity.
► Elementary and middle school teacher productivity increases with experience. ► Inconsistent relationship between professional development and teacher productivity. ► Teachers' pre-service training and exam scores are unrelated to productivity.
Looking beyond enrollment Castleman, Benjamin L; Terry, Bridget
Journal of labor economics,
10/2016, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The government has attempted to ameliorate gaps in college access and success by providing need-based grants, but little evidence exists on the long-term impacts of such aid. We examine the effects ...of the Florida Student Access Grant (FSAG) using a regression-discontinuity strategy and exploiting the cut-off used to determine eligibility. We find that grant eligibility had a positive effect on attendance, particularly at public 4-year institutions. Moreover, FSAG increased the rate of credit accumulation and bachelor’s degree completion within 6 years, with a 22% increase for students near the eligibility cut-off. The effects are robust to sensitivity analysis.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act significantly expanded the responsibilities of auditors, management, and corporate governance actors such as the audit committee and the board. This interview-based research ...extends an earlier study conducted in 1999-2000 by examining auditors' experiences in working with corporate governance actors in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era. Thirty audit managers and partners from three of the Big 4 firms participated in the study. In line with regulatory reforms and a monitoring perspective, auditors indicate that the corporate governance environment has significantly improved in recent years with audit committees that are substantially more active and diligent and possessing greater expertise and power to fulfill their responsibilities. The results indicate that in many instances audit committees play a passive role in helping to resolve contentious financial reporting issues with management, with respondents indicating that the auditor and management often try to resolve issues before they come to the attention of the audit committee.
Affirmative action raises the likelihood of getting into college or obtaining a government job for minority social groups in India. I find that minority group students are incentivized to stay in ...school longer in response to changes in future prospects. To identify causal relationships, I leverage variation in group eligibility, school age cohorts, and state-level intensity of implementation in difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs. These estimators consistently show that affirmative action incentivizes about 0.8 additional years of education for the average minority group student and 1.2 more years of education for a student from a marginal minority subgroup.
We examine how mutual funds from 26 developed and developing countries allocate their investment between domestic and foreign equity markets and what factors determine their asset allocations ...worldwide. We find robust evidence that these funds, in aggregate, allocate a disproportionately larger fraction of investment to domestic stocks. Results indicate that the stock market development and familiarity variables have significant, but asymmetric, effects on the domestic bias (domestic investors overweighting the local markets) and foreign bias (foreign investors under or overweighting the overseas markets), and that economic development, capital controls, and withholding tax variables have significant effects only on the foreign bias.
This paper investigates the effects of crop genetic diversity on farm productivity and production risk in the highlands of Ethiopia. Using a moment-based approach, the analysis uses a stochastic ...production function capturing mean, variance, and skewness effects. Welfare implications of diversity are evaluated using a certainty equivalent, measured as expected income minus a risk premium (reflecting the cost of risk). We find that the effect of diversity on skewness dominates its effect on variance, meaning that diversity reduces the cost of risk. The analysis also shows that the beneficial effects of diversity become of greater value in degraded land.
OLS regression has typically been used in housing research to determine the relationship of a particular housing characteristic with selling price. Results differ across studies, not only in terms of ...size of OLS coefficients and statistical significance, but sometimes in direction of effect. This study suggests that some of the observed variation in the estimated prices of housing characteristics may reflect the fact that characteristics are not priced the same across a given distribution of house prices. To examine this issue, this study uses quantile regression, with and without accounting for spatial autocorrecation, to identify the coefficients of a large set of diverse variables across different quantiles. The results show that purchasers of higher-priced homes value certain housing characteristics such as square footage and the number of bathrooms differently from buyers of lower-priced homes. Other variables such as age are also shown to vary across the distribution of house prices.
This paper presents spatially explicit analyses of the greenspace contribution to residential property values in a hedonic model. The paper utilizes data from the housing market near downtown Los ...Angeles. We first used a standard hedonic model to estimate greenspace effects. Because the residuals were spatially autocorrelated, we implemented a spatial lag model as indicated by specification tests. Our results show that neighborhood greenspace at the immediate vicinity of houses has a significant impact on house prices even after controlling for spatial autocorrelation. The different estimation results from non-spatial and spatial models provide useful bounds for the greenspace effect. Greening of inner city areas may provide a valuable policy instrument for elevating depressed housing markets in those areas.
We apply recent econometric advances to study the distribution of commuters' preferences for speedy and reliable highway travel. Our analysis applies mixed logit to combined revealed and stated ...preference data on commuter choices of whether to pay a toll for congestion-free express travel. We find that motorists exhibit high values of travel time and reliability, and substantial heterogeneity in those values. We suggest that road pricing policies designed to cater to such varying preferences can improve efficiency and reduce the disparity of welfare impacts compared with recent pricing experiments.
PDF
