Education program meets.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings - National Bureau of Economic Research - Conference news

NBER's Program on Education, directed by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford University, met in Cambridge on May 1. These papers were discusssed:

John P. Papay and John B. Wilier, Harvard University, and Richard J. Murnane, Harvard University and NBER, "The Consequences of High School Exit Examinations for Struggling Urban Students: Evidence from Massachusetts"

Esther Duflo, MIT and NBER; Pascaline Dupas, Dartmouth College; and Michael Kremer, Harvard University and NBER, "Peer Effects and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya"

Ofer Malamud, University of Chicago, and Kiki Pop-Eleches, Columbia University and NBER, "The Effect of Computer Use on Child Outcomes"

Parag A. Pathak, Harvard University, and Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College, "Leveling the Playing Field: Sincere and Sophisticated Players in the Boston Mechanism"

3. Kirabo Jackson, Cornell University, "A Little Now for a Lot Later: A Look at a Texas Advanced Placement Incentive Program"

Eric P. Bettinger, Case Western Reserve University and NBER, "Paying to Learn: The Effect of Financial Incentives on Elementary School Test Scores"

The growing prominence of high-stakes exit examinations has made questions about their effects on student outcomes increasingly important. Exit examinations can cause students to drop out of school for several reasons: because they fear taking the test; because they fail it and become discouraged; or because they repeatedly retake the examination and cannot pass it. Papay and his coauthors use a natural experiment to evaluate the causal effects of high-stakes testing on high school completion for the cohort scheduled to graduate from Massachusetts high schools in 2006. They find that, for low-income urban students on the margin of passing, failing the tenth grade mathematics examination reduces the probability of on-time graduation by approximately 8 percentage points. Among students who fail the tenth grade mathematics examination, the low-income urban students are just as likely to retake the test as apparently equally skilled suburban students, but are much less likely to pass the retest. Furthermore, failing the eighth grade mathematics examination reduces by 3 percentage points the probability that low-income urban students stay in school through tenth grade. There are no such effects found for wealthier urban students, or for suburban students regardless of their family income.

Duflo and her co-authors provide s experimental...