The special education workforce has faced a crisis of attracting and retaining qualified educators in recent years. A new volume takes an approach linking recruitment, education, support and leadership to produce and keep quality teachers. The book calls for a whole systems approach, not the temporary fixes that have been widely attempted in recent years to ensure quality education for some of the nation's most vulnerable student populations.

A new study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics assessed life trajectories of children in Lesotho, Africa, across a wide range of educational and later-life outcomes. The study found that children who enrolled in primary school at an older age—despite an initial disadvantage in years of schooling—were more likely to remain in school through adolescence, obtained higher total years of schooling, and developed greater literacy than children who began primary school at younger ages. The older children were also more likely to delay marriage, have fewer children, hold higher-earning jobs, and accumulate greater wealth.

Warren Buffett advised that you should never invest in a business you can’t understand. But that hasn’t stopped many investors.

New research from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin might help them better understand the complications of companies they’re investing in. The study offers the most precise and comprehensive tool yet for measuring business complexity.

The tool, devised by Sara Toynbee, associate professor of accounting, simplifies the measurement by using artificial intelligence. It also finds that in areas such as structuring debt, complexity can sometimes be a good thing.

In a new study, “Who’s Afraid of the Minimum Wage? Measuring the Impacts on Independent Businesses Using Matched U.S. Tax Returns,” researchers examined how small and medium-sized firms accommodated minimum wage hikes along product and labor market margins. The study found that firms reacted to increases in minimum wage differently depending on their size, but most adapted well, and the effect on workers was also largely positive.