This paper seeks to identify the characteristics of applicants to
graduate school in economics that predict successful job placement after
completion of graduate school. Although there is considerable uncertainty in
predicting the success of prospective Ph.D. students, the results indicate…

We report preliminary results of an analysis of the reaction of stock prices to
announcements of reductions in force (RIFs) using a large sample of such announcements
during the 1970-1997 period collected from the Wall Street Journal index. We find…

Despite earlier evidence to the contrary, recent inquiries appear to reach a consensus that the poor
pay more for food. However, these studies utilize samples drawn on the basis of prior
knowledge of unfair pricing strategies, proximity of volunteer surveyors,…

Inequality in the unconditional distribution of observed wage rates in the U.S. rose substan-
tially during the 1980s, mostly in the lower tail of the distribution. The causes of this rising
wage inequality are obscured by the fact that concurrent…

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

Anecdotal evidence suggests that uncontrolled managers let wages rise above competitive levels.
Testing this popular perception has proven difficult, however, because independent variation in the
extent of managerial discretion is needed. In this paper, we use states’ passage of anti-takeover

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…

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to…

We study the reaction of stock prices to announcements of reductions in force
(RIFs) using a sample of nearly 3878 such announcements in 1176 large firms during the
1970-97 period collected from the Wall Street Journal Index. We note that,…

This paper provides a long-term follow-up of students who participated in the Tennessee STAR experiment. The Tennessee STAR experiment randomly assigned l 1,600 elementary school
students and their teachers to a small class, regular-size class or regular-size class with a…