College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education

Every year, students and parents eagerly scour the new college rankings. But those rankings may be misleading them about the "best" colleges and universities. New data and technology offer an opportunity to really measure how well colleges and universities are preparing their undergraduate students

Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority

College graduation rates for minority students are often shockingly low. And most institutions have significantly lower graduation rates for black students than for white students. But, as Research and Policy Manager Kevin Carey documents in a new Education Sector report, these high-failure rates are not inevitable: Some institutions are graduating black students at a higher rate than white students

The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act

When policymakers wrote the No Child Left Behind Act, their goal was to steadily raise the bar for academic achievement. But many states have undermined the spirit of the law by lowering achievement goals every year. Kevin Carey explains how these states are gaming NCLB's accountability system -- and doing so with the full approval of the U.S. Department of Education

Hot Air: How States Inflate Their Educational Progress Under NCLB

A new Education Sector analysis finds that many states are systematically overstating their performance under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, hurting students and undermining the law's credibility in the process

Research on land markets in South Asia : what have we learned?

The authors review the literature on land markets in South Asia to clarify what's known and to highlight unresolved issues. They report that: (1) We have a good understanding of why sharecropping persists and why it can be superior to other standard agricultural contracts. We have less understanding of what determines the relative efficiency of sharecropping in different environments and why other apparently superior contractual relationships are rare. (2) Insecure rights to land adversely affect production and investment incentives in areas outside of South Asia, but in South Asia strong evidence linking investment and rights to production is scarce. (3) An inverse relationship between farm size and output per unit area is a recurrent feature in data from South Asia, apparently related to land-labor interactions. (4) Although small farms seem to be more efficient than large ones, small farmers have trouble raising their profitability and enlarging their holding, largely because of credit constraints, but also because of poverty and policy that discriminates against them. (5) Misguided land reform in the past has made tenancy unattractive to landowners, so large capital-intensive farms have developed. Political economic analysis is needed to explain the failure of past land reform, as well as distortions in agricultural input and output markets in (6) South Asia. Land fragmentation (as distinguished from farm size) has caused productivity losses. Those losses have not been quantified and the reasons fragmentation persists are poorly understood. (7) Transaction costs are a significant impediment to functioning land markets. In South Asia, transfers of land rights are complicated by lack of explicit title to land, and by informal and customary rights. (8) One pressing research problem is gender discrimination, an important factor in land market imperfections -especially (within the household) the separation of land management and its control. Research needs include more systematic regional comparisons, the use of more panel data, and an investigation of how agricultural productivity is affected by gender problems and land fragmentation.Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Land Use and Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction,Land Use and Policies

The Perils of Tax Smoothing: Sustainable Fiscal Policy with Random Shocks to Permanent Output

If permanent output is uncertain, tax smoothing can be perilous: both debt levels and tax rates are difficult to stabilize and may drift upwards. One practical remedy would be to target the debt. However, our simulations confirm that such a policy would require undesirably volatile fiscal adjustments and may inhibit countercyclical borrowing. An alternative would be to link the primary surplus not only to the debt ratio (like tax smoothing) but also to its volatility, thus preempting further adjustments while gradually reducing the debt.tax smoothing, sustainability, forecast error

Nominal Wage Stickiness and Aggregate Supply in the Great Depression

Building on earlier work by Eichengreen and Sachs, we use data for 22 countries to study the role of wage stickiness in propagating the Great Depression. Recent research suggests that monetary shocks, transmitted internationally by the gold standard, were a major cause of the Depression. Accordingly, we use money supplies and other aggregate demand shifters as instruments to identify aggregate supply relationships. We find that nominal wages adjusted quite slowly to falling prices, and that the resulting increases in real wages depressed output. These findings leave open the question of why wages were so inertial in the face of extreme labor market conditions.

The Impact of the Shortage of Safe Assets on the Global Economy

Essentially, the U.S. is like a bank that serves as an intermediary for the world’s financial assets. It sells liquid assets to the world’s savers at the price of net foreign investment income. Foreign investors are increasingly passing on assets with higher yield in order to purchase low-yield, but highly liquid and safe U.S. assets, such as the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasury securities. Consequently, there is a real threat that has emerged as a result of the U.S.’s position as a financial intermediary to the world: a shortage of safe assets. This shortage of safe assets matters because it suspends hope of a full economic recovery due to the reduced nominal spending caused by these holdings. This scenario can seriously endanger the value of the dollar and the safety of U.S. safe assets, which would almost certainly lead to more future economic downturns. With this paper I intend to analyze the reasons for the shortage of safe assets and the impact it has had on the global economy and the United States in its position as a banker to the world, and then use econometrics to quantify and prove its importance to the state of the global economy

At Risk: The Bay Area Greenbelt

In 2006, Greenbelt Alliance, the Bay Area's land conservation and urban planning organization, published the newest edition of its landmark study on the state of the region's landscapes. The report found that if current development patterns continue, roughly one out of every 10 acres in the entire Bay Area could be paved over in the next thirty years. Today, there are 401,500 acres of greenbelt lands at risk of sprawl development. That includes 125,200 acres at risk within the next 10 years, classified as high-risk land, and 276,200 acres at risk within the next 10 to 30 years, classified as medium-risk land. Around the region, the places at highest risk -- the sprawl hot spots -- include the I-80 corridor in Solano County, the eastern cities in Contra Costa County, Coyote Valley in southern Santa Clara County, the Tri-Valley area of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, and areas along Highway 101 through Sonoma County

Bay Area Smart Growth Scorecard

The Bay Area Smart Growth Scorecard is a landmark assessment of the planning policies of all 110 cities and counties of the San Francisco Bay Area.Although a city's current development is apparent to anyone who visits it, the policies that guide a city's future development are not so obvious. The Smart Growth Scorecard provides the first view into these policies and the first comparison among them.The Smart Growth Scorecard evaluated 101 cities in seven policy areas:preventing sprawl; making sure parks are nearby; creating homes people can afford; encouraging a mix of uses; encouraging density in the right places; requiring less land for parking; defining standards for good development. On average, Bay Area cities scored 34% (of a possible 100%), meaning cities are doing only a third of what they could be to achieve smart growth.The Smart Growth Scorecard evaluated eight counties (San Francisco is treated as a city) in five policy areas:managing growth; permanently protecting open space; preserving agricultural land; conserving natural resources; and offering transportation choices. On average, Bay Area counties scored 51%.The scores are low overall. But in every policy area, at least one city or county is doing well, whether it is a city that is encouraging walkable neighborhoods, or a county that is preserving its agricultural land. The Association of Bay Area Governments estimates that Bay Area will have one million additional residents by 2020; the Smart Growth Scorecard evaluates how well all the region's jurisdictions are planning for that growth, and how they can do better