LATEST JOURNAL ARTICLES

ECONOMICS

RANDALL REBACK, "Teaching to the Rating: School Accountability and the Distribution of Student Achievement," Journal of Public Economics, Volume 92 Issue 5-6 (2008) pages 1394-1415.

This paper examines whether minimum competency school accountability systems, such as those created under No Child Left Behind, influence the distribution of student achievement. Because school ratings in these systems only incorporate students' test scores via pass rates, this type of system increases incentives for schools to improve the performance of students who are on the margin of passing but does not increase short-run incentives for schools to improve other students' performance. Using student-level, panel data from Texas during the 1990's, I explicitly calculate schools' short-run incentives to improve various students' expected performance, and I find that schools do respond to these incentives. Students perform better than expected when their test score is particularly important for their schools' accountability rating. Also, low achieving students perform better than expected in math when many of their classmates' math scores are important for the schools' rating, while relatively high achieving students do not perform better. Distributional effects appear to be related to broad changes in resources or instruction, as well as narrowly tailored attempts to improve the performance of specific students.

KRISTIN MAMMEN, "The Effect of Children's Gender on Living Arrangements and Child Support," American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings. Volume 98 Issue 25 (2008)

Previous evidence suggests that the gender composition of a family's children specifically, the presence of sons affects a number of parental behaviors, including marriage formation, marriage disruption, and living arrangements. Using the March Current Population Survey from 1988 to 2006, this paper examines whether girls are at a double disadvantage in terms of living in single mother homes, and in the likelihood of receiving child support from absent fathers. The findings show that girls are indeed more likely to live in single mother homes and boys are overrepresented in married parent homes with a father or stepfather, and in single father families. However, the child support results suggest if anything that single mothers are slightly disadvantaged by having sons.

NEUROSCIENCE & BEHAVIOR

Akers, K. G., Yang, Z., DelVecchio, D. P., Reeb, B. C., Romeo, R. D., McEwen, B. S., and Tang, A. C.,
"Social competitiveness and plasticity of neuroendocrine function in old age: influence of neonatal
novelty exposure and maternal care reliability." PLoS ONE. 3(7):e2840. (2008)

Early experience is known to have a profound impact on brain and behavioral function later in life. Relatively few studies, however, have examined whether the effects of early experience remain detectable in the aging animal. Here, we examined the effects of neonatal novelty exposure, an early stimulation procedure, on late senescent rats' ability to win in social competition.

PSYCHOLOGY

ROBERT REMEZ, Daria F. Ferr o, Stephanie C. Wiss ig, and Claire A. Landau, "Asynchrony tolerance in the
perceptual organization of speech," Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2008, 15 (4), 861-865

Is the syllable the unit of perceptual organization in the perception of speech? This project developed new, more sensitive measures of auditory perceptual coherence, and found that dynamic perceptual integration occurs at much finer temporal grain than the syllable pace. The results establish limits on accounts of auditory perceptual organization and audiovisual integration.