Joe A. Stone

Student Achievement in Public Schools: Do Principals Make a Difference?.

Abstract The authors of this paper find that principal behavior and attributes significantly influence individual student achievement. Effective principal activities include instructional leadership (setting clear priorities and evaluating instructional programs, and organizing and participating in staff development programs) and conflict resolution (establishing a consensus on objectives and methods, maintaining effective discipline, and mediating personal disputes). These results, based upon data from a nationally representative sample of over 14,000 elementary school students, provide strong confirmation of the major conclusions from recent case studies, which arc characterized by very limited samples and weak controls for individual student and teacher attributes. In addition, the finding that principals make a difference to student achievement adds further evidence to the debate over whether schools make a difference.

Teacher Unions and the Productivity of Public Schools

Do teacher unions affect the productivity of public schools? The authors examine this question using individual student data from the Sustaining Effects Survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. Holding resources constant and using achievement gains on standardized tests as the measure of output, they find that union districts are seven percent more productive for average students. For the minority of students who are significantly above or below average, however, nonunion districts are more productive by about the same margin, apparently because teacher unions reduce the use of specialized instructional techniques. This result is consistent with the view that unions tend to standardize the workplace. Across all students, the average union productivity advantage is three percent.

Are private schools really better

Religion, politics, and schools are a volatile mixture in the national debate over various proposals for school choice, proposals in which students would no longer be constrained to attend the public-school district in which they live, but could instead use government-supplied vouchers or tuition subsidies to offset the costs of attending a private school. The national debate has reached the level of presidential politics and led to well-known private-school choice experiments such as those currently underway in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio. Underlying the school-choice movement is the widely held belief that private schools respond to competition in ways public schools do not, and consequently are superior to public schools in providing educational services. Some basic empirical evidence seems to bear this contention out: Private-school students routinely perform at a higher level on standardized tests and are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college than their public-school counterparts, even with many other observed differences, such as family income, parental education levels, and school inputs, held constant. Indeed, despite substantial performance differentials between publicand private-school students, private

Determinants of intra-industry trade: A longitudinal, cross-country analysis

Determinants of Intra-Industry Trade: A Longitudinal, Cross-Country Analysis. — This study examines the determinants of intra-industry trade (IIT using longitudinal data for 68 countries for 1970–1987. The analysis distinguishes between manufacturing and nonmanufacturing countries and compares traditional static estimates with dynamic ones. This approach permits distinctions between equilibrium and disequilibrium structures and, similarly, between historical and current sources of IIT. The results are generally supportive of IIT hypotheses, but there are important differences between manufacturing and nonmanufacturing countries and between the static and dynamic structures. Moreover, the extent of IIT appears to be dominated more by preference than by scale differentials, at least among manufacturing countries.ZusammenfassungBestimmungsgründe des intraindustriellen Handels. Eine Zeitreihenuntersuchung im Länderquerschnitt. — Die Verfasser untersuchen die Bestimmungsgründe des intraindustriellen Handels (IIH und benutzen dabei Zeitreihendaten für 68 Länder in der Zeit von 1970 bis 1987. Die Untersuchung unterscheidet zwischen Industrieländern und Nicht-Industrieländern und vergleicht traditionelle statische Schätzungen mit dynamischen. Dieses Vorgehen ermöglicht es, zwischen Gleichgewichts und Ungleichgewichtsstrukturen und — in ähnlicher Weise — zwischen historischen und gegenwärtigen Bestimmungsgründen des IIH zu unterscheiden. Die Ergebnisse stützen generell die IIH-Hypothesen, aber es gibt erhebliche Unterschiede zwischen Industrie- und Nicht-Industrieländern und zwischen statischen und dynamischen Strukturen. Außerdem scheint der Umfang des IIH mehr durch Unterschiede in den Präferenzen als durch Unterschiede in den Skalenerträgen bestimmt zu sein, zumindest im Handel zwischen Industrieländern.

Is Union Job Dissatisfaction Real

The Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) data base was created in 1987 by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. It was based upon a 1986 survey of 125,000 self-employed persons; it includes five self-contained samples of 25,000 each: 1) Hispanics, 2) blacks, 3) all other minorities, 4) females, and 5) nonminority males. Two versions of the CBO data files focus, respectively, upon 1) self-employed persons, and 2) small firms. For each observation, data were collected upon owner human capital, demographic traits, and financial capital investment in ones firm. Firm specific data are extensive, including sales, profits, employment, payroll, etc.

On the Contract Curve: A Test of Alternative Models of Collective Bargaining

The traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employers labor demand curve, but an alternative model places wage-employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve. This paper derives a multidimensional (hedonic) contract-curve model in which employment-security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employers demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract-curve and demand-constraint models using data for public school teachers in New York State. Estimates clearly support the contract-curve model over the demand-constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment-security provisions.

Teachers, Unions, and Wages in the 1970s: Unionism Now Pays

This paper provides evidence that confirms the results of previous studies that teacher unionism produced relatively small wage gains during the early 1970s, but it also shows that union gains increased substantially in the late 1970s. The evidence is based on an application of two complementary research designs—cross-section wage-level regressions and cross-section wage-change regressions—to national samples of teacher data for 1974–75 and 1977–78. The authors conclude that the union/nonunion wage differential among teachers reached 12 to 22 percent by the late 1970s, and during the period 1974–78 the real wages of unionized teachers increased while those of nonunionized teachers declined. They offer several possible explanations for these trends.

Impact of the Terms of Trade on the U.S. Trade Balance: A Reexamination

The right conclusion could be that there is a strong connection between the spectral components with specified periods. A possible economic interpretation could identify a strong long-term (in the sense of the specified periods) connection between both series. But that would still not allow us to say anything concerning the size and direction of the time delay between the two series. For such an analysis we would have to, at least, consider the phase angles between the components. Because of the ambivalent meaning of the phase angle (in relation to the direction and number of periods) the final answer could come only from the time domain analysis. However, the fact that only spectral components with longer periods, i.e., smaller frequencies, show coherency suggests something else: In order to influence the balance of trade the changes in the terms of trade should be durable enough. Mathematical formalization of this concept of durability would therefore be helpful. I would propose that further research be done in this respect.

Male-Female Differences in Promotions: EEO in Public Education

Unlike previous investigations of employment-related discrimination, which deal almost exclusively with issues of compensation or occupation segregation, we examine discrimination in promotions. Specifically, we investigate gender differences in promotions to administrative positions in elementary and secondary public education and assess the influence of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity enforcement. Based upon longitudinal data for thousands of individual educators, discrimination complaints, and other related evidence for the states of Oregon and New York, we conclude that significant apparent discrimination present in the early 1970s declined by more than half by the late 1970s and that equal employment opportunity enforcement contributed to the decline.

An Integrated Test for Electoral Cycles in the U.S. Economy

This paper offers the first integrated test of the electoral model of business cycles. The test begins with unrestricted estimates of presidential electoral patterns in U.S. economic outcomes (real GNP, unemployment, and inflation) and policies (money growth and the adjusted budget surplus). These estimates are then used to determine whether the estimated electoral patterns in macropolicy yield predicted electoral patterns for macro outcomes that are consistent with estimates of both actual electoral patterns in outcomes and voting behavior. The results indicate that four-year electoral cycles in macroeconomic outcomes and policies are strongly significant for the United States for the period 1951I to 1986II. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.