Forty states, including the District of Columbia, have established state longitudinal data systems (SLDS). The data included, intended functions, and methods for establishing SLDS vary from state to state. Further, forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have received one or more federal grant to support SLDS development. The adoption of…

Chapter 1 studies how the interaction of student information with constraints dictated by market design determines higher education choices and outcomes. I study strategic application incentives in imperfect implementations of centralized assignment mechanisms in higher education. I ask whether, in markets with both a central match for public…

Facing the increased demand for accountability, colleges and universities nationwide embarked on various initiatives to increase college attainment. One such effort is the Florida state statute, commonly referred to as excess hour surcharge policy, which was implemented at 12 state universities effective July 2009. The Florida legislature intends…

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have recently attracted the interest of millions of users who can now not only connect and interact with their friends--as it also happens in traditional online social networks--but can also voluntarily share their whereabouts in real time. A location database is the backbone of a location-based social…

Educational intermediary organizations, as defined by Honig (2004a), are characterized by their internal placement within schools as they mediate change among groups during the policymaking process. As intermediary organizations work to bring about internal changes, however, they are still performing their core external functions by operating as…

The purpose of this study was to clarify the ways that a district used its teacher staffing and professional development policies to increase the supply of effective teachers in high-poverty schools, to determine the efficacy of these policies in the view of district administrators and teachers, and to identify the facilitators and constraints to…

This study was aimed to investigate the potential negative impact that positive (e.g., praise and rewards) and punitive (e.g., sending students to the office) disciplinary techniques, commonly used within the Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) approach, have on students' prosocial motivation, and how aspects of…

This dissertation explores and explains the organizational responses of Mexican public state universities to an ambitious incentive-based policy created by the federal government in 2001: "The Integral Program for Institutional Strengthening" ("PIFI"). Drawing upon literature on organizational-environmental relationships and on…

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are a recent and popular approach in developing countries to improve health and education prospects of poor families through conditional financial incentives. However. due to sub-optimal transfers and administrative difficulties in identifying needy families, many CCT programs suffer from incomplete…

Many public school choice programs use centralized mechanisms to match students with schools in absence of market-clearing prices. Among them, the Boston mechanism is one of the most widely used. It is well-known that truth-telling may not be optimal under the Boston mechanism, which raises the concern that the mechanism may create a disadvantage…

This study evaluated the relationships between classroom practices and mathematics motivation. The evaluation was given in a specific context, namely eighth grade in U.S. middle schools. Using quantitative methods, the study adopted data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007 and compared classroom practices…

Institutional reforms have been proposed to improve the delivery and financing of education. School Based Management (SBM) is one such institutional reform where decision making is transferred to the school level. Funds are transferred directly to the school and parents, along with teachers and the principal, allocate and oversee the use of…

Health and education are two important issues in developing economies. Field and natural experiments provided me with great opportunities for identifying the effects of health insurance and incentive on doctors' prescribing behaviors and the peer influences among students. The first chapter examines whether doctors write more expensive…

Chapter 1 examines the effects of college quality on students' learning, employment and earnings in Colombia. Scores on a national college "entry" test solely determine admission to many selective Colombian universities, creating exogenous peer and resource quality variation near admission cutoffs. In one regression discontinuity (RD)…