Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The influx of immigrants has shifted the ethnic composition of public schools in many states including North Carolina. Recent evidence from North Carolina suggests that a larger share of Limited English students is associated with a slight decline in performance solely for students at the top of the achievement distribution. The heterogeneous peer effects by achievement level lead us to explore in this paper whether the increased immigration has differential effects by gender and race. Utilizing fixed effect methods that allow us to address possible endogeneity with respect to the schools students attend, we find evidence of heterogeneous peer effects …

This paper examines the effect of the introduction of automatic grade promotion on student performance in 1,993 public primary schools in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. A difference-in-difference approach that exploits variation over time in the adoption of the policy allows the identification of the treatment effect of automatic promotion. I find a negative and significant effect of about 6% of a standard deviation on math test scores. Under plausible identifying assumptions the estimates can be interpreted as the disincentive effect on student effort associated with the introduction of automatic promotion.

What drives governments with similar revenues to provide very different amounts of goods with private sector substitutes? Education is a prime example. I use exogenous shocks to Brazilian municipalities' revenue during 1995-2008 generated by non-linearities in federal transfer laws to demonstrate two things. First, municipalities with higher income inequality or higher median income allocate less of a revenue shock to education and are less likely to expand public school enrollment. They are more likely to invest in public infrastructure that is broadly enjoyed, like parks and roads, or to save the shock. Second, I find no evidence that the quality …