This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in public economics. The first chapter examines the labor market for public school teachers in Wisconsin. By stitching together publicly available cross-sectional data to form a 20-year panel of teachers, I am able to replicate and extend the work of Hanushek, Kain and Rivkin who performed a similar analysis in Texas. The main takeaway is that teachers ap- pear to select on wages, but that student characteristics appear more important in predicting teacher churn. In the second chapter, I present short-term analysis of a randomized-controlled trial designed to test the efficacy of active learning methods for teaching intermediate calculus to first-year college students. The results were in- conclusive, suggesting substantial heterogeneity in student preferences and aptitudes for different styles of learning. The final chapter presents the analysis of a large-scale randomized-controlled trial evaluating the potential for messaging-based nudges to elicit increased real estate tax compliance in Philadelphia. Our primary conclusions are that most proposed messaging strategies are indistinguishable from a plainly- worded reminder bill (the exception being consequentialist letters threatening repercussive action absent compliance), but that the saliency per se of a plainly-worded bill can induce late payers to remunerate more quickly.