Suchergebnisse

Rigorous courses are an important resource, distributed within schools, that merit attention as a central determinant of student achievement and future outcomes (Cook and Evans, J Labor Econ. 18(4):729–754, 2000; Rose and Betts, Rev Econ Stat. 86(2):497–513, 2004). Yet, black students are less likely to be enrolled in advanced courses in general (ex. Darity et al. 2001; Klopfenstein, Contemp Econ Pol. 23(3):416–28, 2005) and specifically Algebra 1 in middle school (Riley 1997). Debate exists around the potential benefits or drawbacks for black students attending highly integrated schools relative to highly segregated schools. This study examines which school characteristics are associated with large disparities in black student enrollment in Algebra 1 relative to white student enrollment in Algebra 1 in the same middle schools in North Carolina. Of particular interest is the relationship between access and the percentage of white students in a school. The study finds that: (1) black students are underrepresented in Algebra 1 in essentially all schools in North Carolina; (2) the largest disparities occur in schools that are highly integrated while the disparities are reduced in schools that are either large majority white or large majority non-white; (3) schools with a larger share of white teachers are related to larger disparities between black and white students; (4) the marginal effects of racial composition on the relative disparity in enrollment are significantly larger for black females than black males.

AbstractThere is a perception among native born parents in the USA that the increasing number of immigrant students in schools creates negative peer effects on their children. In North Carolina, there has been a significant increase in immigrants, especially those with limited English language skills. Recent data suggests that North Carolina has the eighth largest English-language learner (ELL) student population and over 60 % of immigrants are from Latin America and the Caribbean. While past research suggests negative though negligible peer effects of Limited English (LE) students and black students on the achievement of other students, potential peer effects of students from Latin America in general have not been considered. In this paper, we attempt to identify both LE student and Latin American (LA) student peer effects by separately utilizing fixed effects methods that allow us to deal with the potential selectivity across time and schools. On average, we find no evidence of negative peer effects of LE students on females and white students but note small negative effects on average on males and black students. We also find that, holding constant other factors, an increase in the share of LA students does not create negative peer effects on native students' achievement. Rather, it is the limited English language skills of some of these students that lead to small, negative peer effects on natives.JEL Classification: I20, I21, J15, J24.

Recent evidence suggests that exposure to a larger share of Limited English (LE) students is associated with a slight decline in performance for students at the top of the achievement distribution. In this paper we explore whether LE peer effects differ by gender and race. Utilizing school-by-year fixed effect methods that allow us to address possible endogeneity with respect to the schools students attend, we find evidence of heterogeneous peer effects of LE students on natives. Specifically, we find no LE student peer effects on females' achievement in math and reading but significant negative effects on males and black students.

Abstract
Approximately half of the states in the United States have some form of high school exit exam. One purpose of the exit exams is to create a clear bar which students must pass in order to graduate. Effective exit exams may encourage marginal students to spend additional time on schooling in order to pass the exam. This study exploits state-level variations in timing of implementation to understand how students have responded to the state exit exams. This study uses the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). The ATUS captures, in detail, how individuals spend their day. We find that exit exams are associated with an increase in the amount of time that students spend on educational activities by almost 20 minutes per day in the months in which exams are typically given. The increase comes mainly from an increase in time spent in school and not time spent outside of school on education-related activities. The additional time for education appears to be a trade-off with time spent watching television, which shows a significant drop in exam months for students facing exams.

There is a rich literature on charitable giving which considers incentives applied to existing and potential donors. We contribute to current field experiment research in two important ways. First, we establish results for the impact of incentives on acquisition of new donors for organizations that do not have clearly partisan appeal, unlike much of the existing work. Second, we consider the influence of incentive gifts, which we term bonus trigger gifts. We find that promising that a bonus gift of $10 will be added to each donation significantly influences the acquisition and behavior of new donors. Although the $1 and $5 incentive conditions do not affect the response of potential donors, the promise of the $10 bonus increased the likelihood of acquiring a new donor and likely changed the distribution of the new donors' gifts.

The purpose of this paper is to formally evaluate whether the deleterious impact of unemployment on mental health increases as skin shade darkens for black women in the U.S. Using data drawn from the National Survey of American Life, we find strong evidence of a gradient on depression between skin shade and unemployment for black women. These findings are consistent with the premises of the emerging field of stratification economics. Moreover, the findings are robust to various definitions of skin shade. Unemployed black women with darker complexions are significantly more likely to suffer their first onset of depression than unemployed black females with lighter skin shade. While in some cases, lighter skinned black women appeared not to suffer adverse effects of unemployment compared to their employed counterparts, persons with dark complexions did not enjoy the same degree of protection from poor mental health.