This paper exploits idiosyncratic variations in school cohorts’ gender composition to investigate the short and long-term effects of school peers’ gender. Using French administrative data over the 2008–2012 period, it shows that the proportion of female peers’ in middle school not only affects students’ contemporaneous performance but also influences their subsequent educational attainment. More specifically

There is strong assortative mating by field of study. To examine to which extent this is due to self selection or to a causal effect of access to specific ”marriage markets”, we use data from participants in admission lotteries of four oversubscribed studies in the Netherlands. For each of the four studies, we find that the winning compliers of an admission lottery are significantly more likely than

This paper studies the causal effect of grade retention in primary school on juvenile crime in Chile. Implementing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that repeating an early grade in primary school decreases the probability of committing a crime as a juvenile by 14.5 percentage points. By estimating and simulating a dynamic model, we show that the RD result is mainly driven by two mechanisms

Since the 1990s, the Swedish education market has gone through a dramatic transformation due to the introduction of voucher-funded independent schools. We make use of data on school applications to condition on student preferences for independent versus public education, and estimate a positive relationship between independent upper secondary school attendance and grades, graduation rates, and post-secondary

This study examines the peer effects of domestic violence within school classrooms. Thus, it builds on the findings of Carrell and Hoekstra (2010) and Carrell et al. (2018) and expands them in two aspects. First, we focus our attention in less extreme cases of domestic violence than those that get reported to public institutions. Second, we also study the peer effects of domestic violence over a novel

This paper asks to what extent host language proficiency can insure immigrants against the risk of ending up in mismatched jobs. Using the 2003-2016 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the paper discriminates between three forms of mismatch, overqualification, underqualification and overskilling. Host language proficiency is instrumented using Bleakley and Chin

To study the long-term effects of school-starting-age rules in a setting with early ability tracking, we exploit the birth month threshold used in the Netherlands. We find that students born just after the threshold perform better at the end of primary school than students born just before it. This translates into increased placement in high ability tracks in secondary education. This difference diminishes

This paper examines differences in STEM retention between minority and non-minority students enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1980 through 2006. Using detailed administrative records of undergraduate students, we document that minority students and non-minority students take divergent pathways through the STEM major. Specifically, minority students take fewer lower

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 inhibited face-to-face education and constrained exam taking. In many countries worldwide, high-stakes exams happening at the end of the school year determine college admissions. This paper investigates the impact of using historical data of school and high-stakes exams results to train a model to predict high-stakes exams given the available data in the Spring. The

This paper documents a robust achievement gap between the math scores of Indigenous and white youth in Canada between 1996 and 2008. Using data from the restricted-access National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth we show that after controlling for a rich set of observables, students who self-identify as Indigenous perform 0.31 standard deviations lower on a standardized math test compared

This paper investigates pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to college education for academically marginal students in South Korea. The Korean government limits the number of admission slots at each college by assigning a quota for each year, and the quota is binding. An increase in the quota allows more academically marginal students to enter college. The IV estimation using differences in the ratio

I investigate the Kenyan government’s 2008 public secondary school expansion policy which lowered school fees and increased capacity. This policy rapidly increased the proportion of students continuing from primary to secondary school, particularly from areas with low initial primary to secondary transition rates. Using this regional variation in exposure to the program together with birth-cohort variation

This study presents empirical evidence that a health improvement program—privatization of municipal water services—in Argentina during the 1990s has had a negative effect on long-term human capital accumulation. Exploiting variations across regions and cohorts, I find that early childhood exposure to the program reduces years of schooling by around 0.5 years. The negative effect is more pronounced

Internships during tertiary education have become substantially more common over the past decades in many industrialised countries. This study examines the impact of a voluntary intra-curricular internship experience during university studies on the probability of being invited to a job interview. To estimate a causal relationship, we conducted a randomised field experiment in which we sent 1248 fictitious

Using detailed Danish administrative data covering the entire population of students entering higher education in the period 1985 to 2010, we investigate the importance of a student’s peers in higher education for the decision to drop out. We use high school GPA as a predetermined measure of student ability and idiosyncratic variation in peer composition across cohorts within the same education and

There is growing interest in using measures of teacher applicant quality to improve hiring decisions, but the statistical properties of such measures are not well understood. We use unique data on structured ratings solicited from the references of teacher applicants to explore the dimensionality of measures of teacher applicant quality and the inter-rater reliability of the reference ratings. Despite

This paper uses data on Ohio school districts to estimate the short and long term impact of different types of school expenditures on student outcomes. Our identification strategy employs a dynamic regression discontinuity design that relies upon the exogenous variation in public school funding created by marginally approved or failed local referenda to fund Ohio schools. We find that additional school

This paper examines the effects of Asian peers on non-Asian student achievement in New York City public schools. We use exogenous variation in the share of Asian students across cohorts within schools stemming from a fertility shock among the Asian population in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Results show that a 10-percentage-point increase in the share of Asian students reduces non-Asian math and

We estimate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-reported school enrollment using a sample of 16-to-18-year-old youth from the January 2010 to the December 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS). The pandemic reduced the likelihood of students reporting that they were enrolled in high school by about 1.8 percentage points in April 2020 vs. in the same month in prior years, although enrollment rebounded

Although rising average grades appear to be common at post-secondary institutions in the U.S., there is still little work examining mechanisms driving this increase in grades. This paper uses data from a public research university to examine one mechanism in particular: instructor level incentives that are linked to gender and contract status. We hypothesize that instructors with more job uncertainty

More than 1 in 7 people in Europe live in a household whose income is below the national poverty line, but more than 30% of people consider themselves to live in poverty. This study provides evidence on the causal relationship between education and various dimensions of poverty. I construct a novel database comprising compulsory schooling reforms in 32 European countries and use them as instruments

Graduate student teaching assistants from underrepresented groups may provide salient role models and enhanced instruction to minority students in STEM fields. We explore minority student-TA interactions in an important course in the sciences and STEM – introductory chemistry labs – at a large public university. The uncommon assignment method of students to TA instructors in these chemistry labs overcomes

Inward foreign direct investment (IFDI) has often been considered to play a prominent role in the development of human capital in the host economy by introducing a foreign wage premium into the labour market. However, extant evidence on IFDI labour market effects is inconclusive, especially in emerging economies. We investigate for the case of Mexico whether foreign wage premia have an effect on educational

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant expansion of higher education enrolment. There is a particular interest among policy makers for further growth in STEM subjects, which could lead to larger classes in these fields. This study estimates the effect of class size on academic performance of university students, distinguishing between STEM and non-STEM fields. Using administrative

Numeracy and literacy are important foundation skills which command significant wage premia in modern labour markets. The existence of gender differences in these skills is therefore of potential concern, and has spurred a large amount of research, especially with respect to numeracy skills. Still, little is known about the moment in which such gaps emerge, how they evolve, and if this evolution differs

We investigate the male–female gap in principal compensation in state and national data: detailed longitudinal personnel records from Missouri and repeated cross-sections from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). In both data sets, we estimate substantively important compensation gaps for school leaders. In Missouri, female principals make approximately $1,450 less annually

Despite widespread belief that majoring in science in high school has a greater payoff in the Indian labor market than majoring in business/humanities, there is no hard evidence to substantiate this thought. Here I provide the first evidence of the causal effect of majoring in science on individuals’ labor market outcomes relative to majoring in business/humanities using microdata from India. Estimating

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) substantially lowered the trade barrier between Mexico and the United States. I study the effect of American industries’ increased competition against Mexican imports on educational attainment at the postsecondary level. Using the commuting-zone-by-state level variations in the protection against import competition, I find evidence for a substantial increase

This paper studies the impact of education reforms in Estonia in the 1990s on adult skills using the OECD PIAAC surveys. Estonia implemented extensive education reforms in the early 1990s throughout Estonian-speaking schools while Russian-speaking schools were exposed to less comprehensive reforms, which were implemented later. A large minority of Estonia’s population at the time was enrolled in Russian-speaking

Educational and skill-building programs are commonplace in prisons and have been the focus of recent prominent policy initiatives. These educational programs are expected to increase prisoners’ post-release employability, with the hope that these lead to both private and public benefits. One of the most popular programs prepares prisoners to pass the GED exam, which is an academic certification for

Although a sizeable literature studies the effect of Medicaid on health, less is known about its effects on education. We use a discontinuity in Medicaid eligibility based on date of birth and administrative school records to study the effects of expanded Medicaid eligibility during middle childhood, between the ages of 8 and 11. We evaluate effects of this Medicaid expansion on outcomes measured a

Although the Janus v. AFCSME (2018) decision fundamentally changed the institutional context for U.S. teachers’ unions by placing all public school teachers in a “Right to Work” (RTW) framework, little research exists to conceptualize the effects of such policies that hinder unionization. To fill this gap, I exploit the different timing across states in the passage of RTW policies in a differences-in-differences

Since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. The current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters in North Carolina as a natural experiment to assess the impacts of charter school growth on teacher quality and student composition in traditional public schools

Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered

To determine whether scaling decisions might account for fadeout of impacts in early education interventions, we reanalyze data from a well-known early mathematics RCT intervention that showed substantial fadeout in the two years after the intervention ended. We examine how various order-preserving transformations of the scale affect the relative mathematics achievement of the control and experimental

The gender wage gap persists in the workplace in part because women major in fields that lead them into lower-paid occupations than fields associated with majors men choose. An open question is why women are more likely than men to switch towards majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Drawing on research suggesting that women are affected more by negative feedback than men, we use unique administrative

Schools vary in quality, and high-performing schools tend to be oversubscribed: there are more applicants than places available. In this paper, we use nationally representative cohort data linked to administrative education records to study the consequences of failing to gain admission to one’s first-choice secondary school in England. Our empirical strategy leverages features of the institutional

This paper estimates the causal impact of an upper secondary curriculum reform in Sweden that increased students’ course-taking flexibility in year 2000. In the most popular upper secondary program, it led to a significant decrease in mandatory mathematics requirements. Using administrative Swedish data, we estimate the causal impact of the reform on tertiary education outcomes and expected earnings

A growing body of research has found that student-teacher race match is associated with higher test scores, teacher expectations, and teacher perceptions of students. This paper contributes to the student-teacher race match literature by investigating the effect of race match on course grades. To the extent that race match is associated with higher course grades for minority students, a more diverse

Higher education graduates with work experience enter the labour market more smoothly. This study analyses how work experience from vocational education and training (VET) affects labour market outcomes after higher education. To account for selection into VET, we use the regional enrolment rate as an instrument for upper-secondary VET. Results suggest that work experience gained during VET leads to

We study gender differences in decision-making strategy when applying for college using applications data for all college applicants in Ireland over the 2015–17 period. Detailed information on high school subjects and grades enable us to examine how the college choices of equally achieving students differ by gender. We find that female students better balance the opportunity to aim for highly selective

Our goal is to investigate the pathways that link welfare receipt across generations. We undertake a mediation analysis in which we not only calculate the intergenerational correlation in welfare, but also quantify the portion of that correlation that operates through key mechanisms. Our data come from administrative welfare records for young people (aged 23–26) and their parents over nearly two decades

This paper studies spillovers from older to younger siblings in higher education choices. Exploiting discontinuous admission rules generated by Chile’s centralized admission system to higher education, we identify strong sibling spillovers in the choice of college. Having an older sibling enroll in a given college increases by 42% the probability of enrolling in that institution. In contrast, we find

This paper investigates whether the effects of a reform that substantially increased daily instruction time in Chilean primary schools vary depending on school institutions. Focusing on incumbent students and exploiting an IV strategy, we find that longer daily schedules increase reading scores at the end of fourth grade and that the benefits are greater for pupils who began primary education in no-fee

Despite the well-documented benefits of high-quality child care, many preschool-age children in the U.S. attend low-quality programs. Accordingly, improving the quality of child care is increasingly an explicit goal of government policy. However, accomplishing this goal requires a thorough understanding of the factors that influence parents’ child care decisions. This paper provides the first evidence

Weekend feeding (“BackPack”) programs that provide food to children have grown dramatically in recent years, yet their effects on educational outcomes have been little investigated. Our study combines administrative student data on test scores and absences in Northwest North Carolina elementary schools with primary data on program participation. School and student program eligibility criteria is used

I document that being bullied at school has a strong positive association with support for redistribution in adulthood. Using unique Japanese survey data, I estimate that the bullied are 5–7 percentage points more likely to support redistribution. I carefully examine whether omitted factors drive this positive association by considering a rich set of socioeconomic and psychological mediators. The estimate

This papers adds to the literature on child bodyweight and human capital using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey Kindergarten Class of 2010–2011. We examine how bodyweight is related to both children's test scores and teacher assessment of ability. We find bodyweight has little effect on math or reading for girls, but is negatively related to test scores and teacher assessments in science

We study the effect of opening a new high school on individual schooling decisions at the end of lower secondary education. The working sample covers all ninth graders between 2007–2008 and 2012–2013 in France. The two-way fixed-effect estimation strategy uses variation in time and space to estimate the causal effect of an increase in school supply. Opening a new high school significantly increases

In this paper, we study the evolution of cognitive and noncognitive skills gaps for children of immigrants between kindergarten and 5th grade using two cohorts of elementary school students. We find some evidence that children of immigrants begin school with lower math scores than children of natives, but this gap disappears in later elementary school. For noncognitive skills, children of immigrants

This article provides evidence from four studies in Mexico on how the age of children relative to their school class—their “relative age”—produces an illusory gap in academic skills and affects the experiences of students, their choices, self-concept, and expectations. The first study shows that relative age confers an advantage in achievement tests at ages 12–15 that makes older students look academically

This paper examines the effects of instructors’ attractiveness on student evaluations of their teaching. We build on previous studies by holding both observed and unobserved characteristics of the instructor and classes constant. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that many instructors, in addition to traditional teaching in the classroom, also teach in the online environment, where attractiveness

I examine the importance of non-cognitive skills in the matching process in higher education in the United States. Across two longitudinal data sources, I show that students with lower non-cognitive skills are more likely to undermatch (enrolling in less selective colleges given their academic credentials) and less likely to overmatch. The application process drives the relationship between non-cognitive

Evidence of grade inflation in U.S. high schools is often misinterpreted due to confusion about how grade inflation is, or should be, defined. This note reduces the confusion by introducing a typology of grade inflation and discussing the implications of each type. We then provide empirical examples of each type of grade inflation using transcript and test-score data from Algebra I classes in North

Universities use ‘first in family’ or ‘first generation’ as an indicator to increase the diversity of their student intake, but little is known about whether it is a good indicator of disadvantage. We use nationally representative, longitudinal survey data linked to administrative data from England to provide the first comprehensive analysis of this measure. We employ parametric probability (logit)

The level of financial inequality among U.S. higher education institutions has important implications for students and society, yet few scholars have examined this topic using established methods for measuring inequality. This paper updates and extends previous work while introducing decompositions that shed light into key trends that we observed for the 2004–2017 period: increasing inequality in total

This article aims to investigate how students in receiving schools are affected by school closures. The effects are analyzed in a quasi-experimental study of all Swedish middle schools that received displaced students from 2000 to 2016, utilizing family fixed effects. The results show that the inflow of displaced students had a negative effect on student outcomes in the receiving schools in terms of

This study examines the impact of enrolling into dual apprenticeship programmes during secondary education on six early employment outcomes. Our contribution to the literature is threefold. First, we apply a method that has rarely been used in this literature to control for potential selection biases. Second, this method allows us to distinguish between the programmes’ direct effect (conditional on

We examine AY2013 annual salaries, annual teaching assignments, and career publishing histories for more than 700 full-time lecturers and tenure-track faculty at 37 public Ph.D.-granting departments of economics. The roughly 15% of teaching faculty who were full-time lecturers were younger, more likely to be female and to teach at the program from which they received their Ph.D., and were assigned