NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
New NBER Research

9 February 2010

Incentives in High School Affect College Outcomes

Kirabo Jackson analyzes the effects of a program that pays 11th and 12th grade students -- and their teachers -- for achieving passing scores on Advanced Placement exams. He finds that the students at schools that adopt this program are more likely to go to college, to have higher college GPAs, and to stay in college past their freshman year than students with comparable performance in earlier grades at schools without the program. The incentive program even improves college outcomes for students who would have gone to college anyway, and appears to increase college graduation rates for black and Hispanic students.

8 February 2010

Returns to High School Sports

In order to comply with the federal Title IX, U.S. high schools rapidly increased their rates of athletic participation for girls —to about the same rates as for boys -- between 1972 and 1978. Betsey Stevenson estimates that a 10-percentage point rise in state-level sports participation for girls generates roughly a one percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1-2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation. More opportunities to play sports also lead to greater female participation in previously male-dominated occupations, particularly high-skill occupations.

5 February 2010

Shopping for Lottery Tickets

Is there competition for lottery ticket sales between states? Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff develop a simple model in which consumers can choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble, which will decline with the size of the jackpot and the odds of winning. Their model predicts that per-resident sales should be more responsive to prices in small states with densely populated borders, relative to large states with sparsely populated borders. When they study the multi-state games of Powerball and Mega Millions, they find that states do face competitive pressures from neighboring lotteries, but that the effects vary significantly across states
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