NBER
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Reviewing the Research on National Maternity Leave Policies and their Effects on Women’s Careers, Children’s Health, and Employers’ Bottom Line
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In 2015, women surpassed men in their likelihood of holding a bachelor’s degree. The gender pay gap has been steadily closing since 1973 but remains persistent. One potential avenue for reducing this gap is further support for women with children, particularly in the form of maternity leave. To provide perspective…
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Immigration and Jobs: David Card’s Influential Study
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A chief concern of modern policy is the impact of immigrants on natives’ employment prospects. The difficulty for academics attempting to verify these effects is daunting. In the real world, immigrants arrive from and disperse throughout many areas, choosing cities with favorable labor market conditions. Meanwhile, large macroeconomic events also…
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Innovation, Skilled Immigrants, and Why We Need More of Them
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The immigration debate playing out in the United States is beleaguered by concerns over whether unskilled immigrant workers are undermining the economic position of low-skilled American citizens. But concern over low-skilled immigration may be overshadowing discussion of high-skilled immigration, a less controversial but arguably more impactful domain of immigration policy.…
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Higher Education in the Digital Age: A Conversation with Michael Lovenheim
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Since its inception, online education has faced heavy skepticism, if not downright opposition. A recent study by David Deming, Michael Lovenheim, and Richard Patterson finds that students benefit from the education quality improvements that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions make in response to the disruptive threat posed by their online competitors. Michael…
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Popularizing Remedial Education in India
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Since the turn of the century, primary school attendance has increased worldwide. UNICEF reports that the number of children who are primary-school age not attending school declined globally by 40 percent between 2000 and 2013. Despite impressive progress, many of these students are unable to demonstrate the expected skills required…
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Disruptive Competition: Online Degree Programs in the Higher Education Market
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In February 2006, Congress repealed the “50 percent rule.” Originally enacted in 1992, this rule prevented undergraduate institutions from receiving federal financial aid — including funding through Title IV or the Higher Education Act (HEA) — if more than 50 percent of courses were offered online or more than half…
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Examining Intergenerational Differences in Educational Performance of Immigrant Students
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Over the course of the past half-century, the United States has seen the largest wave of immigration since the Age of Mass Migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning in 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act allowed for a significant increase in the flow of immigrants into…
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Does School Segregation Facilitate the Formation of Criminal Networks?
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People are hard-wired to form social networks, and an individual’s social network can play a role in shaping his or her behavior. Unfortunately, this social dynamic is as true for criminal networks as it is for more benign social networks. Among young people, if the behavior of an individual’s group…
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Less Qualified and Less Diverse: Race-Neutral Affirmative Action Hurts Chicago’s Exam Schools
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Selective admissions high schools, or exam schools, have long been at the center of education policy debates due to their struggles in balancing fair enrollment and improving diversity. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson that using race as an admissions requirement is unconstitutional…
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Expanded Medicaid Eligibility Reduces Debt for Low-Income Individuals
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In 2009, when President Obama placed healthcare at the top of his agenda, the weight of healthcare costs on individuals was a driving media narrative. Stories about families losing their homes to pay for cancer treatments added a human face to the fact that medical expenses are one of the…
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Improving Education Quality in Chile Through Structured Instruction Methods for Teachers
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Improving the quality of education worldwide continues to be a policy challenge. Recently, UNESCO estimated that 38 percent of children have not mastered the basics of reading and math, although over half of them have been in school for four years. One of the key issues behind this figure is…