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Full-Text Articles in Economics

The Job Of Human Capital: What Occupational Data Reveal About Skill Sets, Economic Growth And Regional Competitiveness, Lillian Frances Stewart Nov 2015

The Job Of Human Capital: What Occupational Data Reveal About Skill Sets, Economic Growth And Regional Competitiveness, Lillian Frances Stewart

ETD Archive

A region's workforce has been described as its greatest asset. Guided by human capital theory and new growth theory, regions have pursued economic development policies to increase the number of college-educated workers and expand the pool of STEM -- science, technology, engineering, and math -- talent. Academic literature and policy interventions have focused on a region's human capital in terms of educational attainment instead of a more fine-grained definition of human capital based on skills and competencies. This dissertation integrates economic and business theory and combines three federal databases to explore regional human capital assets. Findings suggest that policymakers may …


Cash On The Table? A Behavioral Analysis Of Refund Claimants And Annuitants In The Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, Martin F. Lueken Aug 2014

Cash On The Table? A Behavioral Analysis Of Refund Claimants And Annuitants In The Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, Martin F. Lueken

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation documents pension benefit choices made by public school teachers enrolled in the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System (TRS), where they choose between taking a lump-sum withdrawal of their refundable contributions and deferring a pension benefit. The analysis explores the extent to which vested teachers enrolled in TRS separate from service with positive pension wealth, estimates how much money is "left on the table" at a conventional discount rate, and investigates what types of teachers display higher or lower discount rates as indicated by cashout patterns. To control for the relative attractiveness between choices, the analysis relies on three central …


Selection Bias In College Admissions Test Scores, Jesse Rothstein, Melissa Clark, Diane Schanzenbach Apr 2012

Selection Bias In College Admissions Test Scores, Jesse Rothstein, Melissa Clark, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

Data from college admissions tests can provide a valuable measure of student achievement, but the non-representativeness of test-takers is an important concern. We examine selectivity bias in both state-level and school-level SAT and ACT averages. The degree of selectivity may differ importantly across and within schools, and across and within states. To identify within-state selectivity, we use a control function approach that conditions on scores from a representative test. Estimates indicate strong selectivity of test-takers in "ACT states," where most college- bound students take the ACT, and much less selectivity in SAT states. To identify within- and between-school selectivity, we …


Education And The Poor, Lisa Barrow, Diane Schanzenbach Dec 2011

Education And The Poor, Lisa Barrow, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

No abstract provided.


How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence From Project Star, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Schanzenbach, Danny Yagan Oct 2011

How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence From Project Star, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hilger, Emmanuel Saez, Diane Schanzenbach, Danny Yagan

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade. This article evaluates the long-term impacts of STAR by linking the experimental data to administrative records. We first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. We then document four sets of experimental impacts. First, students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes. Class size does not have a significant effect on earnings …


Experimental Evidence On The Effect Of Childhood Investments On Postsecondary Attainment And Degree Completion, Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, Diane Schanzenbach Dec 2010

Experimental Evidence On The Effect Of Childhood Investments On Postsecondary Attainment And Degree Completion, Susan Dynarski, Joshua Hyman, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among those with the lowest …


Left Behind By Design: Proficiency Counts And Test-Based Accountability, Derek Neal, Diane Schanzenbach Apr 2010

Left Behind By Design: Proficiency Counts And Test-Based Accountability, Derek Neal, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

We show that within the Chicago Public Schools, both the introduction of NCLB in 2002 and the introduction of similar district-level reforms in 1996 generated noteworthy increases in reading and math scores among students in the middle of the achievement distribution but not among the least academically advantaged students. The stringency of proficiency requirements varied among the programs implemented for different grades in different years, and our results suggest that changes in proficiency requirements induce teachers to shift more attention to students who are near the current proficiency standard.


First In The Class? Age And The Education Production Function, Diane Schanzenbach, Elizabeth Cascio Dec 2006

First In The Class? Age And The Education Production Function, Diane Schanzenbach, Elizabeth Cascio

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

Older children outperform younger children in a school-entry cohort well into their school careers. The existing literature has provided little insight into the causes of this phenomenon, leaving open the possibility that school-entry age is zero-sum game, where relatively young students lose what relatively old students gain. In this paper, we estimate the effects of relative age using data from an experiment where children of the same biological age were randomly assigned to different classrooms at the start of school. We find no evidence that relative age impacts achievement in the population at large. However, disadvantaged children assigned to a …


What Have Researchers Learned From Project Star?, Diane Schanzenbach Dec 2006

What Have Researchers Learned From Project Star?, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

No abstract provided.


Resource And Peer Impacts On Girls' Academic Achievement: Evidence From A Randomized Experiment, Diane Schanzenbach Apr 2005

Resource And Peer Impacts On Girls' Academic Achievement: Evidence From A Randomized Experiment, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

No abstract provided.


Would Smaller Classes Help Close The Black-White Achievement Gap?, Alan Krueger, Diane Schanzenbach Oct 2002

Would Smaller Classes Help Close The Black-White Achievement Gap?, Alan Krueger, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

No abstract provided.


The Effect Of Attending A Small Class In The Early Grades On College-Test Taking And Middle School Test Results: Evidence From Project Star, Alan Krueger, Diane Schanzenbach Dec 2000

The Effect Of Attending A Small Class In The Early Grades On College-Test Taking And Middle School Test Results: Evidence From Project Star, Alan Krueger, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

This paper provides a long-term follow-up analysis of students who participated in the Tennessee STAR experiment. In this experiment, students and their teachers were randomly assigned to small, regular-size, or regular-size classes with a teacher aide in the first four years of school. We analyse the effect of past attendance in small classes on student test scores and whether they took the ACT or SAT college entrance exam. Attending a small class in the early grades is associated with an increased likelihood of taking a college-entrance exam, especially among minority students, and somewhat higher test scores.