Martin Carnoy is the Lemann Foundation Chair of Education and Economics at Stanford University. He began five decades in the economics of education field studying under Theodore Schultz at the University of Chicago in the early sixties. Since then, he has been engaged in almost every major debate in the field, authoring over forty books and countless articles analyzing educational policy and systems on every continent and developing new frameworks and ways of measuring the process of education. International in outlook, Martin Carnoy has been awarded honorary doctorates around the world. Co-director of the Lemann Center at Stanford, and a former president of the Comparative and International Education Society, Carnoy is also a fellow of the National Academy of Education and of the International Academy of Education.

Preface; Part I. Introduction: 1. The political economy of education; 2. The contribution of the economics of education to education policy; 3. The state and education; Part II. Human Capital: 4. Education, labor markets, and earnings; 5. Age-earnings profiles and the returns to human capital; 6. Measuring the returns to investment in education according to the human capital model; Part III. Alternatives to Human Capital: 7. Alternative conceptions of the relation between skill acquisition and productivity; 8. Conditioned choice and discrimination; Part IV. Education, Economic Growth, and Income Distribution: 9. Education and economic growth; 10. Education and income distribution; Part V. Educational Production Functions: 11. Underlying issues in educational production functions; 12. Modeling and estimating educational production functions; 13. Cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis; 14. Issues in early childhood education; 15. Issues in the production of vocational education; Part VI. Teacher Labor Markets: 16. Fundamental elements in the study of teacher labor markets; 17. The supply of and demand for teachers; 18. Teacher salaries; 19. The politics of teacher labor markets; Part VII. School System Accountability: 20. Public sector accountability; 21. Market accountability; Part VIII. Financing Education: 22. Educational spending; 23. Collecting and allocating revenue for education; 24. More spending on education, improved student achievement, and other student outcomes; Part IX. The Political Economy of Higher Education: 25. Higher educational expansion as a global phenomenon; 26. The financing of higher education; 27. Higher education as an industry; 28. Academic labor markets and student college choice strategies; References; Index.