NBER Publications by Mark Rush

This paper presents the first experimental evidence on the effects of live versus internet media of instruction. Students in a large introductory microeconomics course at a major research university were randomly assigned to live lectures versus watching these same lectures in an internet setting, where all other factors (e.g., instruction, supplemental materials) were the same. Counter to the conclusions drawn by a recent U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis of non-experimental analyses of internet instruction in higher education, we find modest evidence that live-only instruction dominates internet instruction. These results are particularly strong for Hispanic students, male students, and lower-achieving students. We also provide suggestions for future experimentation in other set...

This paper is the first to explore the effects of school accountability systems on high-achieving students' long-term performance. Using exceptional data from a large highly-selective state university, we relate school accountability pressure in high school to a student's university-level grades and study habits. We exploit a change in the state's accountability system in 1999 that led to some schools becoming newlythreatened by accountability pressure and others becoming newly-unthreatened to identify the effects of accountability pressure. We find that an accountability system based on a low-level test of basic skills apparently led to generally reduced performance by high-achieving students, while an accountability system based on a more challenging criterion-referenced exam apparently ...

This paper discusses ongoing research on the relation of money to economic activity in the post-World War I1 United States. As in previous work, the stress is on the distinction between anticipated and unanticipated movements of money. Part I deals with annual data. Aside from updating and refinements of earlier analysis, the principal new results concern joint, cross-equation estimation and testing of the money growth, unemployment, output and price level equations. The present findings raise some doubts about the specification of the price equation, although the other relations receive further statistical support. Part I1 applies the analysis to quarterly data. Despite the necessity to deal with pronounced serial correlation of residuals in the equations for unemployment, output and the ...