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This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualified teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Peru, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable locations attracts better quality applicants and improves student test scores. We then estimate a model of teacher preferences over local amenities, school characteristics, and wages using geocoded job postings and rich application data from the nationwide centralized teacher assignment system. Our estimated model suggests that the current policy is both ineficient and not large enough to effectively undo the inequality of initial conditions that hard-to-staff schools and their communities face. Counterfactual analyses that incorporate equilibrium sorting effects characterize alternative wage schedules and quantify the cost of reducing structural inequality in the allocation of teacher talent across schools.

This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualifed teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Perú, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable locations attracts better quality applicants and improves student test scores. We then estimate a model of teacher preferences over local amenities, school characteristics, and wages using geocoded job postings and rich application data from the nationwide centralized teacher assignment system. Our estimated model suggests that the current policy is both inefficient and not large enough to effectively undo the inequality of initial conditions that hard-to-staff schools and their communities face. Counterfactual analyses that incorporate equilibrium sorting effects characterize alternative wage schedules and quantify the cost of reducing structural inequality in the allocation of teacher talent across schools.

Circularity aims to reduce waste by closing and narrowing resource loops and by extending the lifetime of materials and products. As a consequence of this fundamentally different approach to construction practices, implementation entails a different organization of the building process. The purpose of this research is to make recommendations with respect to the actor network and the decision-making process to facilitate implementation of circularity in construction practices. First, a theoretical framework is developed to structure and prioritize decision-making to implement circularity based on resource and value strategies. Second, this framework is applied to three circular building cases in the Netherlands, relying on stakeholder interviews and documentation. These cases include a renovation project, a newly built project, and a transformation project. Third, analysis of the case study data demonstrates the actor network and decision-making process including the following aspects: Actors, resources, relations, positions, influence, and decision rounds. It can be concluded that: i) some conventional actors have acquired knowledge on circularity; and ii) expert actors emerged who have specialized in circularity. Both types of actors are a prerequisite iii) to implement circular strategies for the beginning and end phase of the building's lifetime; and iv) should be involved early on (in the design-making processes) to influence decision-making on circularity, especially concerning the long-lived layers of a building.

In the construction industry, public and semi-public clients increasingly depend on private parties to achieve project outcomes by adopting network type of governance approaches. However, social-political responsibilities remain at the public side. Hence, the general challenge for public commissioners is to find a new balance between dependency and responsibility when safeguarding competing traditional and network values. Based on three qualitative studies of a PhD project on safeguarding public values by public construction clients, applying concepts from public administration and public value theory, this paper presents three lessons learnt on future roles and responsibilities. We argue that future 'good' commissioning should be 1) more about embedding new value systems and less about changing existing values mechanisms, 2) more about paradox thinking in a convener role and less about trade-offs in a steering role and, 3) more about informal accountability in the value chain and less about formal accountability in the project chain. To ensure the 'right' kind of interference in the value process, public clients' way of coping with publicprivate conflicts, needs to correspond with the internal governance arrangements, and vice versa. Further research should focus on facilitating this alignment by providing a public value safeguarding strategy tool for public construction clients.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare in what ways different types of integrative and collaborative procurement strategies may enhance efficiency and innovation in public infrastructure projects. Further, implementation challenges are identified and discussed. Interview-based case studies were performed of ten infrastructure projects in Sweden and the Netherlands. The projects involve four types of collaborative procurement strategies - collaborative Design-Build (DB) contracts, Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) agreements, Design-Build-Maintain (DBM) contracts and Design-Build-Finance-Maintain (DBFM) contracts. The findings indicate that the duration of the collaboration is fundamental in setting the limits for innovation and that early involvement as well as long-term commitments open up for more innovation. Naturally, the potential for increased efficiency is higher than for innovation and also occurs in collaborations with limited duration. These integrated project approaches, however, still appear to be in an early stage of learning. For a public repeat client to realise the full potential of a new strategy, it is important to have a long-term perspective and capabilities to analyse and learn from the experiences.

In today’s construction industry we witness an increase in public private collaboration in the delivery of public goods. By transferring operational responsibility to private contractors, public construction clients have fewer possibilities to directly influence and steer the outcomes of these processes while remaining socio-political responsible.In this paper we aim to explore how public construction clients try to find a balance in public value management activities by rethinking their roles and responsibilities in the client-contractor relationship. This paper results of a set of semi-structured interviews with different actors playing a part in commissioning of organisations with different degrees of publicness are presented. Results indicate that the alignment of the client role and change in responsibilities should be rather flexible in order to deal with the restrictions that procedural values such as lawfulness, reliability and transparency bring along. This requires significant changes in the interpretation of the commissioning profession and the transformation of the collaborative relationship in public private collaboration. Further research should look more closely into the alignment of the shifted roles and responsibilities and organizational- and steering mechanisms that could be applied to enhance this value shift in practice.

In the construction industry clients largely depend on contractors to deliver projects. According to agency theory problems of goal conflict and information asymmetry arise in this delegation of work because both the principal and the agent are self- interested. The control-oriented governance mechanisms that agency theorists propose as a means to resolve these problems can act counterproductive and give rise to new problems. Stewardship theory offers a counterweight to agency theory and assumes a relational reciprocity between the principal and the steward. Recently, a large group of Dutch public construction clients and contractors have collaboratively expressed their desire to improve their relationship in a manifest called ‘the market vision’. This phenomenon can be interpreted as a desire to shift from a principal- agent towards a principal-steward relationship. The aim of this paper is to explore how public clients engage in stewardship relationships with contractors. This research is based on a case study of one of the most ambitious projects under the umbrella of this market vision trajectory. The analysis of the documents, observation notes and semi-structured interviews with project team members indicate that they developed a relationship which can be characterised as a principal-steward bond. By investing in relationship-building from the pre-commercial phase, throughout the tender phase and the execution phase, they put their individual differences beside in order to reach their initially defined common goal. It remains however to be seen whether this can be considered as a complete stewardship relation.

Architectural firms experience difficulties to establish healthy and sustainable business models as they have to reconcile the often-competing value systems that they are based upon. Organizational members continuously negotiate professional values and beliefs with the firm's commercial goals, resulting in identity-strategy struggles. This study adopts a 'work lens' to investigate the reciprocal tensions between identity and strategy in 17 business model design workshops with members of architectural firms. Observational data show that practitioners collaboratively construct their business models around professional values, thereby strengthening organizational identity but constraining innovation in their business models. The research contributes to the literature on strategic management of architectural firms by articulating how professional aspects of identity enable and constrain practitioners to shape and be shaped by their strategic actions and decisions.

Using a large administrative data set from Chile, we find that, on average, boys perform better than girls in mathematics. In this paper, we document several features of their relative performance. First, we note that the gender gap appears to increase with age (it doubles between fourth grade and eighth grade). Second, we test whether commonly proposed explanations such as parental background and investment in the child, unobserved ability, and classroom environment (including teacher gender) help explain a substantial portion of the gap. While none of these explanations help in explaining a large portion of the gender gap, we show that boys and girls differ significantly in perceptions about their own ability in math. Conditional on math scores, girls are much more likely to state that they dislike math, or find math difficult, compared to boys. We highlight differences in self-assessed ability as areas for future research that might lead to a better understanding of the gender gap in math.

This paper studies the effect of improved neonatal health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW), which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff. Using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from Chile and Norway, we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school. These gains are in the order of 0.15-0.22 standard deviations.

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years after building occupancy, $10,000 of per-student investment in school construction raised reading scores for elementary and middle school students by 0.027 standard deviations. For a student receiving the average treatment intensity this corresponds to a 0.21 standard deviation increase. School construction also raised home prices and public school enrollment in zoned neighborhoods.

This paper investigates the causal relationship between birth weight and school achievement among children in grades 1 through 8. We find that birth weight significantly affects performance on both math and language test scores in school. Children with higher birth weight do better - a 10% increase in birth weight improves performance in math by nearly 0.05 standard deviations in 1st grade. Children who are born at a weight less than 1500 grams (very low birth weight) have scores in math that are 0.15 standard deviations less in 1st grade. We exploit repeated observations on children to show that birth weight has a persistent effect that does not deteriorate as children advance through grades (upto 8th grade). Children with greater birth weight are also less likely to have ever repeated a grade. The causal link is identified by using a twins estimator - we collected birth weight and basic demographic data on all twins born in Chile between 1992-2000 and match these twin pairs to administrative school records between 2002-2008. There are no differences in school attendance by birth weight, suggesting that missing school perhaps due to health problems is likely not a channel via which test score differentials arise.