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Schelling (\"Dynamic Models of Segregation,\" Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971), 143-186) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a \"tipping point,\" all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and Census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition. We find strong evidence that white population flows exhibit tipping-like behavior in most cities, with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5% to 20% minority share. Tipping is prevalent both in the suburbs and near existing minority enclaves. In contrast to white population flows, there is little evidence of nonlinearities in rents or housing prices around the tipping point. Tipping points are higher in cities where whites have more tolerant racial attitudes.

We conducted a randomized experiment with 43,000 EITC recipients at H&R Block. Tax preparers gave simple, personalized information about the EITC schedule to half of their clients. We find no significant effects of information provision on earnings in the subsequent year in the full sample. Further exploration uncovers evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on both self-employment income and wage earnings across the 1,461 tax preparers involved in the experiment. Providing information about tax incentives does not systematically effect earnings on average. However, tax preparers may influence their clients ' earnings decisions by providing advice about how to respond to tax incentives.

What is \"teaching to the test,\" and can one detect evidence of this practice in state test scores? This paper unpacks this concept and empirically investigates one variant of it by analyzing test item–level data from three states' mathematics and reading tests. We show that NCLB-era state tests predictably emphasized some state standards while consistently excluding others; a small number of standards typically accounted for a substantial fraction of test points. We find that students performed better on items testing frequently assessed standards—those that composed a larger fraction of the state test in prior years—which suggests that teachers targeted their instruction towards these predictably tested skills. We conclude by describing general principles that should guide high-stakes test construction if a policy goal is to ensure that test score gains accurately represent gains in student learning.

Experiments that assign intact groups to treatment conditions are increasingly common in social research. In educational research, the groups assigned are often schools. The design of grouprandomized experiments requires knowledge of the intraclass correlation structure to compute statistical power and sample sizes required to achieve adequate power This article provides a compilation of intraclass correlation values of academic achievement and related covariate effects that could be used for planning group-randomized experiments in education. It also provides variance component information that is useful in planning experiments involving covariates. The use of these values to compute the statistical power of group-randomized experiments is illustrated.

Objectives of our study are to develop a procedure for intertemporal comparison of both technical and cost efficiency and estimate farm efficiency for the Korean rice industry from 2003 to 2017. The newly developed base‐year procedure excludes frontier shift and price effects from the standard procedure for intertemporal comparison. An adjusted central limit theorem for sample T‐tests is applied to avoid potential bias from efficiency scores by the Data Envelope Analysis. Our empirical results show that the two procedures yield different scores and trends. The standard approach indicates declining efficiency, while the base‐year method shows overall improvement in farm efficiency.

This paper studies a recent British reform that allowed public high schools to opt out of local authority control and become autonomous schools funded directly by the central government. Schools seeking autonomy had only to propose and win a majority vote among current parents. Almost one in three high schools voted on autonomy between 1988 and 1997, and using a version of the regression discontinuity design, I find large achievement gains at schools in which the vote barely won compared to schools in which it barely lost. Despite other reforms that ensured that the British education system was, by international standards, highly competitive, a comparison of schools in the geographic neighborhoods of narrow vote winners and narrow vote losers suggests that these gains did not spill over.

We analyze short and long-term effects of worker displacement. Our sample consists of male workers displaced from Norwegian manufacturing plants. We find that displacement increases the probability of leaving the labor force by 31%. The drop-out rate from the labor force is particularly high in the first years following displacement. The average earnings effects for those who remain in the labor force are moderate, a 3% loss relative to non-displaced workers after seven years. Splitting displaced workers on within-and between-firm movers, we find that the estimated earnings loss is entirely driven by between-firm movers who experience a 3.6% loss. Transfers to other plants within multi-plant firms upon displacement are quite common. Our results support the view that human capital is partly firm specific and partly industry specific. We find no evidence suggesting that human capital is plant specific.

In this article we have studied a scheme of partitioning the global carbon budget using an equity principle. In contrast to earlier approaches, this article carefully distinguishes between the two quantities – 'entitlements to carbon space' and 'physically available carbon space'. A positive feature of the carbon budgets approach to allocation of mitigation burdens discussed here is that a single framework for mitigation can be applied to all countries. The method offers a concrete operationalization of the principle of achieving the climate goals 'on the basis of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities'.

Previous studies argued that high school resources play a modest role in students' postsecondary destinations, but they ignored schools' programmatic resources, which provide opportunities for marks of distinction, such as Advanced Placement courses, and they focused on older cohorts of high school students who entered colleges before competition over admission to selective colleges intensified in the 1980s. Analyses of data on a cohort of students who entered college in the mid-2000s suggest that programmatic and non-programmatic resources found in high schools influence postsecondary destinations and mediates the effect of family socioeconomic status on choices among 4-year colleges.

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a non-random sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). The model estimates, derived from British panel data for the 1990s, indicate that there is substantial state dependence in poverty, separate from persistence induced by heterogeneity. We also provide estimates of low income transition rates and lengths of poverty and non-poverty spells for persons of different types.