This project is to hold a conference on December 15-16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to reconcile the diverse results concerning the effect of school quality on student achievement and employment earnings. This literature forms a major component of the work on Human Capital, which SBER has launched a major research initiative. The conference will invite papers which attempt to replicate prior results using the same data set, but different investigators; which estimate the same model on different data sets; which estimate previous used models on new data sets not used heretofor; and which generally aim to reconcile the past collection of conflicting results. The sharing of data sets will be an important feature of the papers presented at this conference. The leading empirical journal in economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, has agreed to devote an issue on the conference papers. This project has the potential of encouraging other journals to publish replications of previously published studies and of encouraging economists to share their data and replicate each other's work.
