A Professor Like Me: Influence of Professor Gender on University Achievement

Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female university students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous work at the primary and secondary school level, our focus on large first-year undergraduate classes isolates gender interaction effects due to students reacting to instructors rather than instructors reacting to students. In addition, by focussing on university students, we examine the extent to which gender interactions may exist at later ages. We find that assignment to a same-sex instructor boosts relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small. A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a course by 1.2 percentage points. The effects are similar when conditioning on initial ability (high school achievement), and ethnic background (mother tongue not English), but smaller when conditioning on mathematics and science courses. The effects of same-sex instructors on upper-year course selection are insignificant.Teacher Quality, Higher Education, Gender Role Model Effects

A Professor Like Me: The Influence of Instructor Gender on College Achievement

Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female college students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous work at the primary and secondary school level, our focus on large first-year undergraduate classes isolates gender interaction effects due to students reacting to instructors rather than instructors reacting to students. In addition, by focusing on college, we examine the extent to which gender interactions may exist at later ages. We find that assignment to a same-sex instructor boosts relative grade performance and the likelihood of completing a course, but the magnitudes of these effects are small. A same-sex instructor increases average grade performance by at most 5 percent of its standard deviation and decreases the likelihood of dropping a course by 1.2 percentage points. The effects are similar when conditioning on initial ability (high school achievement), and ethnic background (mother tongue not English), but smaller when conditioning on mathematics and science courses. The effects of same-sex instructors on upper-year course selection are insignificant.

Social History and Agricultural Productivity: The Paris Basin, 1450-1800

This paper uses a sample of leases and a new method to examine total factor productivity in the Paris Basin during the years 1450-1789. After defending the methodology, the paper analyzes he results from the sample, which should dispel the myth of agricultural stagnation in Old-Regime France, at least in the Paris Basin

Un nouvel indice de la productivite agricole: Les baux de Notre Dame de Paris, 1450-1789

This paper presents a new method of measuring agricultural productivity in the era before agricultural censuses, a method that relies on evidence concerning prices and land rental rates to calculate the total factor productivity of agriculture. The method is both more informative and more reliable than the typical comparisons of crop yields and output per worker, and the paper explains it using a sample of leases drawn from the archives of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The analysis of this sample reveals some of the causes of agricultural growth under the Old Regime and suggests that the agriculture of the période was capable of considerable development, at least in the Paris Basin. What growth occurred, though, was extremely sensitive to political crises

Sharecropping and Investment in Agriculture in Early Modern Times

the paper examines the spread of sharecropping that followed a wave of investment in agriculture in sixteenth - and seventeenth-century France. Using results from the modern theory of share contracts, it argues that sharecropping was a means of risk sharing that favored both landlords and tenants. Although the evidence used in this paper comes from France, the results may well apply to other areas of early modern Europe

Public Economics and History: A Review of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel

Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States greatly expands our knowledge of the history of premodern fiscal systems and raises important questions about the political economy of premodern states. Answering those questions can help explain how states developed the capacity to tax; why tax levels and government-spending patterns varied greatly in the past, even though per capita incomes were similar; how government debt and representative institutions arose; and, last but not least, why some premodern states expanded and others collapsed. But firm answers to those questions will have to combine the history outlined in Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States with systematic data and formal models of political economy

Early Modern France: 1450-1700

[Introduction] It is always said," observed Richelieu in his Testament politique, "that money forms the sinews of the state." Most historians of early modern France would agree. "Absolutism was, in large part, the child of the fisc," notes one influential essay on early modern France, and a chorus of recent works repeats the same refrain. Fiscal crises, it seems, provoked nearly every change in the French political system from the Hundred Years War to the Revolution; and the tax system brings into sharper focus than any other facet of the French state both the limits of absolutism and the peculiar nature of liberty in France

Economic Theory and Sharecropping in Early Modern France

This paper uses a simple economic model of contract choice to explain the growth of sharecropping in sixteenth- and seventeenth century France--a topic that figures in much of the social and economic history of the period. The theory turns out to fit both qualitative and quantitative evidence, and although the results are as yet only preliminary, the theory does provide a better account of the spread of sharecropping than the explanations early modern historians have tended to rely upon