In this paper I review the existing evaluations of the effect of the Milwaukee Parental Choice
Program on student achievement. Two of the three existing papers report significant gains in math for the
choice students and two of the three studies report no significant effects in reading. I also extend the analysis
to compare the achievement of students in the choice schools to students in three different types of public
schools: regular attendance area schools, city-wide (or magnet) schools, and attendance area schools with
small class sizes and supplemental funding from the state of Wisconsin (“P-5” schools). The results suggest
that students in P-5 schools have similar math test score gains to those in the choice schools, and students
in the P-5 schools outperform students in the choice schools in reading. In contrast, students in the city-wide
schools score no differently than students in the regular attendance area schools in both math and reading.
Given that the pupil-teacher ratios in the P-5 and choice schools are significantly smaller than those in the
other public schools, one potential explanation for these results is that students perform well in schools with
smaller class sizes.

The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically
underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, relative both to the overall population and to
other academic disciplines. The relative lack of women, African Americans, Hispanics, and
Native Americans within economics is present at the undergraduate level, continues throughout
the academy, and is barely improving over time. In this paper, we present data on the presence
of women and minority groups in the profession and offer an overview of current research on the
reasons for the imbalance, highlighting that implicit attitudes and institutional practices may be
contributing at all stages of the pipeline. We review evidence on how diversity affects
productivity and conclude that the underrepresentation likely hampers the discipline,
constraining the range of issues addressed and limiting our collective ability to understand
familiar issues from new and innovative perspectives. Broadening the pool from which
professional economists are drawn is not just about fairness; it is necessary to ensure the
profession produces robust and relevant knowledge. We propose remedial interventions along
with evidence on effectiveness, identifying several promising practices, programs, and areas for
future research.

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of a workplace education program that
was administered by a community college at two companies. One of the companies we study
is in the manufacturing sector and the other is in the service sector. The analysis relies on
longitudinal administrative data and cross-sectional survey data. We examine a broad range
of outcome variables, including workers’ earnings, performance awards, job attendance, and
subjective performance measures. Our main finding is that the program had a small, positive
impact on earnings at the manufacturing company, but an insignificant impact at the service
company. We also find that the training program had a positive association with the
incidence of job bids, upgrades, performance awards, and job attendance. At the
manufacturing company, occupational courses, such as blue print reading, had the largest
impact.

In this paper we take a “market-based” approach to examine whether increased school expenditures
are valued by potential residents and whether the current level of public school provision is inefficient. We
do so by employing an instrumental variables strategy to estimate the effect of state education aid on
residential property values. We find evidence that, on average, additional state aid is valued by potential
residents and that school districts appear to spend efficiently or, if anything, underspend. We also find that
school districts spend less efficiently in areas in which they face little or no competition from other public
schools, in large districts, and in areas in which residents are poor or less educated. One interpretation of
these results is that increased competition has the potential to increase school efficiency in some areas.

In this paper we set out a simple model of optimal schooling investments that
emphasizes the interaction between schooling choices and income determination; and
estimate it using a fresh sample of data on over 700 identical twins. According to the model,
equally able individuals from the same family should attain the same observed schooling
levels, apart from random errors of optimization or measurement. A variety of direct and
indirect tests provides no evidence against this hypothesis.
We estimate an average return to schooling of 10% for genetically identical
individuals, but estimated returns are slightly higher for less able individuals. Unlike the
results in Ashenfelter and Krueger (1994), which were based on a much smaller sample, we
estimate that schooling is positively correlated with ability level, so that simple cross-section
estimates are slightly upward biased. Taken together these empirical results imply that
more able individuals attain more schooling because they face lower marginal costs of
schooling, not because they obtain higher marginal benefits. The results stand in sharp
contrast to recent claims that genetic factors predetermine education and income, and that
such differences are not amenable to alteration by public or private choices.

One of the best documented relationships in economics is the link between education and
income: higher educated people have higher incomes. Advocates argue that education provides
skills, or human capital, that raises an individual‘s productivity. Critics argue that the documented
relationship is not causal. Education does not generate higher incomes; instead, individuals with
higher ability receive more education and more income. This essay reviews the evidence on the
relationship between education and income. We focus on recent studies that have attempted to
determine the casual effect of education on income by either comparing income and education
differences within families or using exogenous determinants of schooling in what are sometimes
called “natural experiments.” In addition, we assess the potential for education to reduce income
disparities by presenting evidence on the return to education for people of differing family
backgrounds and measured ability.
The results of all these studies are surprisingly consistent: they indicate that the return to
schooling is not caused by an omitted correlation between ability and schooling. Moreover, we find
no evidence that the return to schooling differs significantly by family background or by the
measured ability of the student.

Economists attempting to explain the widening of the black-white wage gap in the late 1970's by
differences in school quality have been faced the problem that recent data reveal virtually no gap in the
quality of schools attended by blacks and whites using a variety of measures. In this paper, we re-
examine racial differences in school quality. We begin by considering the effects of using the pupil-
teacher ratio, rather than the school's average class size, in an education production function since the
pupil-teacher ratio is a rough proxy, at best. Second, we consider the importance of using actual class
size rather than school-level measures of class size.
We find that while the pupil-teacher ratio and average class size are correlated, the pupil-teacher
ratio is systematically less than or equal to the average class size. Mathematically, part of the difference
is due to the intraschool allocation of teachers to classes. As a result, while the pupil-teacher ratio
suggests no black-white differences in class size, measures of the school's average class size suggest that
blacks are in larger classes. Further, the two measures result in differing estimates of the importance of
class size in an education production function. We also conclude that school level measures may obscure
important within-school variation in class size due to the small class sizes for compensatory education.
Since black students are more likely to be assigned to compensatory education classes, a kind of
aggregation bias results. We find that not only are blacks in schools with larger average class sizes, but
they are also in larger classes within schools, conditional on class type. The intraschool class size patterns
suggest that using within-school variation in education production functions is not a perfect solution to
aggregation problems because of non-random assignment of students to classes of differing sizes.
However, once the selection problem has been addressed, it appears that smaller classes at the eighth
grade lead to larger test score gains from eighth to tenth grade and that differences in class size can
explain approximately 15 percent of the black-white difference in educational achievement.

Data from Boozer & Rouse Journal of Urban Economics

Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many
occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring. A change in the
way symphony orchestras recruit musicians provides an unusual way to test for sex-biased
hiring. To overcome possible biases in hiring, most orchestras revised their audition policies
in the 1970s and 1980s. A major change involved the use of “blind” auditions with a
“screen” to conceal the identity of the candidate from the jury. Female musicians in the top
five symphony orchestras in the United States were less than 5% of all players in 1970 but are
25% today. We ask whether women were more likely to be advanced and/ or hired with the
use of “blind” auditions. Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects
framework, we find that the screen increases — by 50% — the probability a woman will be
advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the
likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra
personnel, the switch to “blind” auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase
in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the
percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.