We partner communication technology with school information systems to automate the gathering and provision of high-frequency information on students’ academic progress to parents. We use this technology to send weekly automated alerts to parents about their child’s missed assignments, grades, and class absences. The intervention reduces course failures by 38%, increases class attendance by 17%...

Top Trading Cycles is widely regarded as the preferred method of assigning students to schools when the designer values efficiency over fairness. However, Top Trading Cycles has an undesirable feature when objects may be assigned to more than one agent as is the case in the school choice problem. If agent i’s most preferred object a has a capacity of qa, and i has one of the qa highest prioriti...

Most OECD countries experience high unemployment rates and declining growth in higher educational attainment. An often suggested government policy is therefore to allocate resources towards formal schooling for adults. However, returns on such investments are uncertain and the foregone earnings are potentially large. We use Swedish population register data from 1982 to 2011 to estimate average ...

New Technology in Schools: Is There a Payoff? Despite its high relevance to current policy debates, estimating the causal effect of Information Communication Technology (ICT) investment on educational standards remains fraught with difficulties. In this paper, we exploit a change in the rules governing ICT funding across different school districts of England to devise an instrumental variable s...

An increasingly popular practice in placing students to public schools in the US is the use of school choice programs. In a school choice program, each student submits a preference list of schools to a central authority which then decides upon how to place students to schools while also taking the priorities of students for schools into consideration. The crucial issue here is determining a cen...

Does Education Raise Productivity or Just Reflect It?* It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market. It is not clear, however, whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the worker (through a signalling role). In this Paper...

Since the launch of Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, the amount of publicly available social network data has grown in both scale and complexity. This growth presents significant challenges to conventional network analysis methods that rely primarily on structure. In this paper, we describe a generative model that extends structure-based connection preference methods to include preferences...

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...

We study a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers’ investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. We can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside options will reduce parental and school effort, which are partially compensated through school resources. In this w...

October 2008 Preliminary version Please do not quote! Abstract. This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly according to social and cultural traits. Marrying within a socio-economic group can lead to polarization and exacerbating economic inequality. In the US, there is a co...