AN NBER PUBLICATION
ISSUE: No. 5, May 2007
The Digest
A free monthly publication featuring non-technical summaries of research on topics of broad public interest
The simplified NCLB notification doubled the fraction of parents choosing a different school...The students who gained admission to schools with test scores substantially above their failing school experienced significant improvements in test scores.
In the summer of 2004, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District (CMS) in North Carolina determined that ten elementary schools and six middle schools had failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two consecutive...
Article
The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally 'explains' about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less.
Almost everybody knows that in the past 40 years, the real wages and job prospects for low-skilled men, especially low-skilled minority workers, have fallen. And there is evidence -- although no consensus -- that...
Article
More stringent cigarette regulations have a distinct and direct impact in reducing SIDS deaths. The largest reduction in deaths comes from changes in the monetary price of cigarettes. Each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes reduces the average number of SIDS deaths by a range of 6.7 to 7.4 percent.
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the unexplained, sudden death of an infant under one year of age. SIDS is the leading cause of mortality among...
Article
Quick Enrollment substantially increases savings plan participation relative to the standard opt-in enrollment regime, although these increases are not nearly as large as those obtained by firms that automatically enroll their employees in a savings plan.
Criticisms of America's low national savings rate often hinge on the assumption that this low savings is driven by Americans' proclivity for excessive spending. But in Simplification and Saving (NBER Working Paper No...
Article
Differences in taxes across countries are a very important piece of the explanation for the vastly different levels of hours of market work...hours of work in the United States were roughly the same in 1956 and 2004, while hours of work in Germany decreased by about 40 percent over this same period.
Hours of market work vary widely across OECD countries. For example, in European economies such as France and Germany, hours of work are currently about one third less...