Grossman and Helpman (1991), arose from the desire to explain the enormous disparity of levels and growth rates of per capita output across countries. The belief was that differences in physical and human capital

The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between stu-dent performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into ac-count. These results are also reconciled with meta-analytic approaches and with other investigations on how school resources affect labor market outcomes. Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes. Reflecting its policy significance, an enormous amount of research has focused on the relationship between resources devoted to schools and student performance. Recent interest generated by current policy debates has helped clarify both the interpretation of this work and the resulting policy implications. This article updates previ-

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Abstract Declining contact and cooperation rates in random digit dial (RDD) national telephone surveys raise serious concerns about the validity of estimates drawn from such research. While research in the 1990s indicated that nonresponse bias was relatively small, response rates have continued to fall since then. The current study replicates a 1997 methodological experiment that compared results from a “Standard ” 5-day survey employing the Pew Research Center’s usual methodology with results from a “Rigorous ” survey conducted over a much longer field period and achieving a significantly higher response rate. As with the 1997 study, there is little to suggest that unit nonre-sponse within the range of response rates obtained seriously threatens the quality of survey estimates. In 77 out of 84 comparable items, the two surveys yielded results that were statistically indistinguishable. While the “Rigorous ” study respondents tended to be somewhat less politically engaged, they did not report consistently different behaviors

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Two key questions are addressed regarding the intersection of socioeconomic status, biology, and low birth weight over the life course. First, do the income and other socioeconomic conditions of a mother during her pregnancy affect her chances of having a low-birth-weight infant net of her own birth weight, that of the father, and other family-related, unobserved factors? Second, does an individual’s birth weight status affect his or her adult life chances net of socioeconomic status? These ques-tions have implications for the way we conceive of the relationship between socio-economic status and health over the life course, specifically in sorting out causal directionality. We use intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dy-namics, for the years 1968 through 1992. Results of sibling comparisons (family-fixed-effects models) demonstrate that maternal income does not appear to have a significant impact on birth weight. However, low birth weight results in lower edu-cational attainment net of other factors. These findings suggest that, when consid-ered across generations, causality may not be as straightforward as implied by cross-sectional or unigenerational longitudinal studies.

expert programming assistance. Advocates of school choice argue that tax support of public schools distorts the incentives faced by both the consumers and producers of schooling. They recommend removing this distortion by providing vouchers to subsidize students should they choose to attend private schools. Some reformers see vouchers as a panacea, which will not only enhance the opportunities of poor youth by enabling them to choose better schools but will also improve the public-school system by forcing it to compete for students. A quantitative approach to this question is thought to yield more meaningful results than theoretical arguments. This paper makes use of a model of the behavior of youth and schools to simulate the effects of vouchers of varying sizes on students in different income categories, living in three communities-poor, average, and wealthy-under two assumptions about how public schools spend their resources. The first assumption is that public schools minimize their offerings to individual students (i.e., maximize their surplus) in order to further objectives not valued by students. The second assumption is that public schools act as competitive firms, maximizing their educational

Abstract Attention to the quality of human capital in different countries naturally leads to concerns about how school policies relate to student performance. The data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) provide a way of comparing performance in different schooling systems. The results of analyses of educational production functions within a range of developed and developing countries show general problems with the efficiency of resource usage similar to those found previously in the United States. These effects do not appear to be dictated by variations related to income level of the country or level of resources in the schools. Neither do they appear to be determined by school policies that involve compensatory application of resources. The conventional view that school resources are relatively more important in poor countries also fails to be supported. 