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This paper examines the scalability of the results from the Tennessee Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project, a prominent educational experiment. We explore how the misalignment between the experimental design and the econometric model affects researchers' ability to learn about the intervention's scalability. We document heterogeneity in compliance with class-size reduction that is more extensive than previously acknowledged and discuss its consequences for the evaluation of the experiment. Guided by this finding, we implement a new econometric framework incorporating heterogeneous treatment effects and endogenous class size determination. We find that the effect of class size on test scores differs considerably across schools, with only a small fraction of schools having significant benefits from reduced class sizes. We discuss the challenges this poses for the intervention's scalability and conclude by analyzing targeted class-size interventions.

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT scores that generate discontinuities in admission and enrollment. The typical marginally admitted student completes an additional year of education in the four-year sector, is 12 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor's degree, and eventually earns 5-10 percent more than their marginally rejected but otherwise identical counterpart. Marginally admitted students pay no additional tuition costs thanks to offsetting grant aid; cost-benefit calculations show internal rates of return of 19-23 percent for the marginal students themselves, 10-12 percent for society (which must pay for the additional education), and 3-4 percent for the government budget. Finally, I develop a method to disentangle separate effects for students on the extensive margin of the four-year sector versus those who would fall back to another four-year school if rejected. Substantially larger extensive margin effects drive the results.

We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and school choice--such as school catchment areas and housing regulation. We develop a spatial equilibrium model of residential sorting and school choice, estimated using data from a large school district in the United States. The model replicates the responses of house prices and school enrollment to quasi-experimental variation in school peer composition and school transportation provision. We find that low-income families prioritize proximity to schools while high-income families and families with high-skilled children place more value on school peer composition. We use the model to evaluate how the geography of neighborhood sorting influences the aggregate and distributional outcomes of a school-choice expansion (place-based) and a housing voucher (people-based) policy. We find that both policies result in net welfare losses, with only marginal improvements in school peer composition for the average low-income family. Although eligible families benefit from these policies, the negative impact falls on families who currently invest in their children's education by residing in expensive neighborhoods. Under both policies, higher-income families are less exposed to the inflow of low-income children into their schools, either because of their longer distance from target neighborhoods or because of the cost imposed by residential zoning regulation on voucher recipients.

We present a model of endogenous schooling and earnings to isolate the causal effect of parents' education on children's education and earnings outcomes. The model suggests that parents' education is positively related to children's earnings, but its relationship with children's education is ambiguous. Identification is achieved by comparing the earnings of children with the same length of schooling, whose parents have different lengths of schooling. The model also features heterogeneous preferences for schooling, and is estimated using HRS data. The empirically observed positive OLS coefficient obtained by regressing children's schooling on parents' schooling is mainly accounted for by the correlation between parents' schooling and children's unobserved preferences for schooling. This is countered by a negative, structural relationship between parents' and children's schooling choices, resulting in an IV coefficient close to zero when exogenously increasing parents' schooling. Nonetheless, an exogenous one-year increase in parents' schooling increases children's lifetime earnings by 1.2 percent on average.

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of the distribution of salaries. Our estimates indicate that salaries increase on average by 2 to over 5 percent over the first 6 years post unionization. These effects are driven largely by gains in the bottom half of the wage distribution with little evidence of any impact at the top end. Our evidence indicates that the wage effects are primarily concentrated in the first half of our sample period. We do not find any evidence of an impact on employment.

Transitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively recent entrant into the U.S. early education landscape, combining features of public pre-K and regular kindergarten. We provide the first estimates of the impact of Michigan's TK program on 3rd grade test scores. Using an augmented regression discontinuity design, we find that TK improves 3rd grade math scores by 0.29 standard deviations relative to a counterfactual that includes other formal and informal learning options. This impact is notably large relative to the prior pre-K literature. Estimates for English Language Arts (ELA) are imprecise but suggestive of a positive effect as well.

We study the Tutoring Online Program (TOP), where: (i) tutoring is entirely online; (ii) tutors are volunteer university students, matched with underprivileged middle school students. We leverage random assignment to estimate effects during and after the pandemic (2020 and 2022), investigating channels of impact. Three hours of individual tutoring per week increased math performance by 0.23 SD in 2020 and 0.20 SD in 2022. Higher-dosage yielded stronger effects, while group tutoring smaller effects. TOP enhanced students' aspirations, socio-emotional skills and psychological well-being, but only during school closures. We also estimate the impact of TOP on tutors, finding increases in empathy. [This report received financial support from the Cariplo Foundation.]

We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing of downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific terms can increase demand for higher education insurance to potentially address risk for students with varying outcomes.

Using a rich dataset that merges student-level school records with birth records, and leveraging three alternative identification strategies, we explore how increase in access to charter schools in twelve districts in Florida affects students remaining in traditional public schools (TPS). We consistently find that competition stemming from the opening of new charter schools improves reading--but not math--performance and it also decreases absenteeism of students who remain in the TPS. Results are modest in magnitude.

College attendance has increased significantly over the last few decades, but dropout rates remain high, with fewer than half of all adults ultimately obtaining a postsecondary credential. This project investigates whether one-on-one college coaching improves college attendance and completion outcomes for former low- and middle-income income state aid recipients who attended college but left prior to earning a degree. We conducted a randomized control trial with approximately 8,000 former students in their early- to mid-20s. Half of participants assigned to the treatment group were offered the opportunity to receive coaching services from InsideTrack, with all communication done remotely via phone or video. Intent-to-treat analyses based on assignment to coaching shows no impacts on college enrollment and we can rule out effects larger than a two-percentage point (5%) increase in subsequent Fall enrollment.

We assess the role of information gaps in understanding gender differences in negotiation behavior by conducting a randomized information experiment on the 2018 to 2020 graduating cohorts of undergraduate business majors from Boston University. Prior to starting their job search, treated students were provided with objective information about the gender gap in negotiation among their peers along with the earnings changes conditional on negotiating. We find sizable immediate effects on negotiation intentions that persist to actual negotiation behavior, particularly for men. While the treatment affects women's negotiation behavior through belief-updating, the effects on men's behavior are primarily through increased salience of the information. Further, we find some evidence that gender-specific treatment spillovers likely contribute to the smaller average treatment effects on behavior for women. Overall, our findings suggest that such information interventions can help to nudge women who have potentially large financial returns to negotiation to realize these gains.

We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions in the spirit of the contingent valuation approach allow us to measure the full non-pecuniary benefits of each relevant geographic location, in dollar equivalents. A new specification test is designed and implemented to provide evidence about the quality of these non-pecuniary measures. Supplementing perceived location choice probabilities and expectations about pecuniary factors with our new non-pecuniary measures allows us to estimate a stylized model of location choice and obtain a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors. We also combine the non-pecuniary measures with realized location and earnings outcomes to characterize inequality in overall welfare. [Support was received from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.]

Programs that engage young children in movement and song to help them learn are popular but experimental evidence on their impact is sparse. We use an RCT to evaluate the effectiveness of Big Word Club (BWC), a classroom program that uses music and dance videos for 3-5 minutes per day to increase vocabulary. We conducted a field experiment with 818 preschool and kindergarten students in 47 schools in three U.S. states. We find that treated students scored higher on a test of words targeted by the program (0.30 SD) after four months of use and this effect persisted for two months.

What makes diversity unifying in some settings but divisive in others? We examine how the mixing of ethnic groups in German schools affects intergroup cooperation and trust. We leverage the quasi-random assignment of students to classrooms within schools to obtain variation in the type of diversity that prevails in a peer group. We combine this with a large-scale, incentivized lab-in-field-experiment based on the investment game, allowing us to assess the in-group bias of native German students in their interactions with fellow natives (in-group) versus immigrants (out-group). We find in-group bias peaks in culturally polarized classrooms, where the native and immigrant groups are both large, but have different religious or language backgrounds. In contrast, in classrooms characterized by non-cultural polarization, fractionalization, or a native supermajority, there are significantly lower levels of own-group favoritism. In terms of mechanisms, we find empirical evidence that culturally polarized classrooms foster negative stereotypes about immigrants' trustworthiness and amplify taste-based discrimination, both of which are costly and lead to lower payouts. In contrast, accurate statistical discrimination is ruled out by design in our experiment. These findings suggest that extra efforts are needed to counteract low levels of inclusivity and trust in culturally polarized environments. [Funding for this report was provided by ifo Institute, University of Munich, University of St. Gallen, and University of Hamburg.]

Education is a crucial asset for a country's economic prospects and for its inhabitants. In addition to its direct impact on growth via the accumulation of human capital, it is a critical ingredient in producing an informed citizenry, enhancing their ability to obtain and exert human and political rights and their facility to adapt to changing environments (generated by, e.g., technological or climatic change) among other benefits. In this paper, we study education inequality in LAC (both in quantity and quality), assess how it emerges and amplifies or dampens existing inequalities, and examine the interaction of education inequality with other forms of inequality, primarily income and labor market outcomes. Our analysis is based on primary data from multiple sources.

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more pronounced when the two majors are more distantly related, highlighting the importance of diverse skill sets. Additional analyses demonstrate that double majors are more likely to work in jobs that require a diverse set of skills and knowledge and are less likely to work in occupations that are closely related to their majors.

University-based scientific research has long been argued to be a central source of commercial innovation and economic growth. Yet at the same time, there have been long-held concerns that many university-based discoveries never realize their potential social benefits. Looking across universities, research and commercialization activities such as start-up formation vary tremendously -- variation that could reflect the composition and orientation of faculty research, university-level factors such as patenting and licensing efforts, or broader place-based factors such as location in a technology cluster. We take a first step towards unpacking this heterogeneity in university commercialization by analyzing how the propensity of academic research to spill over to commercial innovation changes when academics move across universities. Our estimates suggest that at least 15-25% of geographic variation in commercial spillovers from university-based research is attributable to place-specific factors. [Funding for this research was received from Harvard Business School's Division of Research and Doctoral Programs, Harvard Economics' SUPER Program.]

This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased school capital spending raises test scores and house prices on average. However, impacts differ vastly across types of funded projects. Spending on basic infrastructure (such as HVAC) or on the removal of pollutants raises test scores but not house prices; conversely, spending on athletic facilities raises house prices but not test scores. Socio-economically disadvantaged districts benefit more from capital outlays, even conditioning on project type and the existing capital stock. Our estimates suggest that closing the spending gap between high- and low-SES districts and targeting spending towards high-impact projects may close as much as 25% of the observed achievement gap between these districts. [Additional support from The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management.]

This paper presents the results from a randomized controlled trial of Chapter One, an early elementary reading tutoring program that embeds part-time tutors into the classroom to provide short bursts of 1:1 instruction. Eligible kindergarten students were randomly assigned to receive supplementary tutoring during the 2021-22 school year (N=818). The study occurred in a large Southeastern district serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students. Students assigned to the program were over two times more likely to reach the program's target reading level by the end of kindergarten (70% vs. 32%). The results were largely homogenous across student populations and extended to district-administered assessments. These findings provide promising evidence of an affordable and sustainable approach for delivering personalized reading tutoring at scale.

This study finds substantial reductions to criminal activity from the introduction of a comprehensive high school support program for disadvantaged youth living in the largest public housing project in Toronto. The program, called Pathways to Education, bundles supports such as regular coaching, tutoring, group activities, free public transportation tickets and bursaries for postsecondary education. In this paper, we use a difference-in-differences approach that compares students living in public housing communities where the program was offered to those living in communities where the program was not offered over time. We find that eligibility for Pathways reduces the likelihood of being charged with a crime by 32 percent at its Regent Park location. This effect is driven by a reduction in charges for breaking and entering, theft, mischief, other traffic offenses and Youth Criminal Justice Act offenses.

We examine how the racial wealth gap interacts with financial aid in American higher education to generate a disparate impact on college access and outcomes. Retirement savings and home equity are excluded from the formula used to estimate the amount a family can afford to pay. All else equal, omitting those assets mechanically increases the financial aid available to families that hold them. White families are more likely to own those assets and in larger amounts. We document this issue and explore its relationship with observed differences in college attendance, types of institutions attended, degrees attained, and education debt using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We show that this treatment of assets provides an implicit subsidy worth thousands of dollars annually to students from families with above-median incomes. White students receive larger subsidies relative to Black students and Hispanic students with similar family incomes, and this gap in subsidies is associated with disadvantages in educational advancement and student loan levels. It may explain 10 percent to 15 percent of white students' advantage in these outcomes relative to Black students and Hispanic students.

Low-performing, high-poverty, public schools notoriously struggle to attract and retain good teachers. This paper studies a setting where independent organizations, including charities and businesses, take over the management of under-performing schools, while funding remains public. Exploiting the staggered expansion of English Sponsor-led academies since the early 2000s, we show that the Sponsor-led takeover leads to substantial changes in the teaching body and the school personnel policy. The probability that the Sponsor appoints a new headteacher doubles upon the takeover, with the new headteacher being, on average, better paid, and more likely to come from outstanding schools. The takeover also induces teacher sorting, with older and lower-achieving teachers leaving the school, and new teachers joining the Sponsor-led school from outstanding schools. Lastly, Sponsors substantially restructure teachers' rewarding scheme and abandon a pay scale entirely based on seniority, leading to a 10 percent increase in pay dispersion across equally experienced teachers.

It is generally agreed upon that most individuals who acquire a college degree do so in their early 20s. Despite this consensus, we show that in the US from the 1930 birth cohort onwards a large fraction -- around 20% -- of college graduates obtained their degree after age 30. We explore the implications of this phenomenon. First, we show that these so-called late bloomers have significantly contributed to the narrowing of gender and racial gaps in the college share, despite the general widening of the racial gap. Second, late bloomers are responsible for more than half of the increase in the aggregate college share from 1960 onwards. Finally, we show that the returns to having a college degree vary depending on the age at graduation. Ignoring the existence of late bloomers therefore leads to a significant underestimation of the returns to college education for those finishing college in their early 20s.

Do white teachers learn racial competency from their Black peers? We answer this question using a mixed-methods approach. Longitudinal administrative data from North Carolina show that having a Black same-grade peer significantly improves the achievement and reduces the suspension rates of white teachers' Black students. Open-ended interviews of North Carolina public school teachers reaffirm these findings. Broadly, our findings suggest that the positive impact of Black teachers' ability to successfully teach Black students is not limited to their direct interaction with Black students but is augmented by spillover effects on early-career white teachers, likely through peer learning.

The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. We investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. We employ non-structural methods to compare turnover and pay in Early Care and Education with those in other sectors that employ similar workers. We estimate a dynamic discrete choice occupational model to quantify the labor supply and turnover elasticities in this industry. In addition, we simulate the impact of wage supplementation programs.

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging temporal and geographic variation in program implementation, we use a two-way fixed effect design and comprehensive administrative records to assess the program's causal impact. By lowering the distance to a university campus, the program successfully increased university enrollment, particularly of less privileged students who are the first in their families to attend a university. The program impacted students from localities up to 30 kilometers from the new campus, reducing spatial inequality. Importantly, this expansion did not lower university completion rates. Furthermore, the program increased high school attendance and completion rates and the proportion of educated workers in the affected localities. [Funding for this report was provided by CAF.]

This paper presents the first evidence of how students make career technical education (CTE) course-taking decisions. Among the universe of Michigan high-schoolers we find large disparities in CTE access and participation by gender, race, and income. We decompose participation gaps between supply (access) and demand (preferences) with a simple discrete choice model. We find that student preferences for CTE content drive participation gaps by gender, inequities in access drive gaps by income, and school-level supply and demand factors combine to create the gaps by race. Policy simulations highlight the importance of accessible CTE delivery models within comprehensive high schools.

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33 government-certified high-quality universities known for superior test scores, graduation rates, and per-student spending. Notably, completing a bachelor's degree converted the loan into a grant. To qualify, students must score in the top 10% of the standardized high school exit exam and have below-median household wealth. Using RD and DD methodologies, we use nationwide administrative microdata linking all high school test takers, postsecondary attendees, and formal workers to estimate impacts up to eight years after high school. Financial aid improves college enrollment, quality, and attainment, particularly in STEM-related fields. The earnings gains are substantial, growing, and driven partly by high-quality universities improving students' skills, as demonstrated by their performance on Colombia's college graduation exam. A welfare analysis using the MVPF yields over $4.8 per dollar of government spending. Lastly, the program narrowed socioeconomic gaps in college attainment, skill development, and earnings among academically similar students without adversely affecting non-recipients, thereby promoting equity and efficiency.

Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people's time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data -- Facebook interests -- to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United States. Patience is strongly positively associated with student achievement in both countries, accounting for two-thirds of the achievement variation across Italian regions and one-third across U.S. states. Results also hold for six other countries with more limited regional achievement data.

We offer a new analysis of a large-scale trial of an early-childhood education program that targeted premature, low-birthweight children. This targeting heavily oversampled twins, whose outcomes differed significantly from singletons'. Singletons' gains in short-term cognition and age-18 non-cognitive skills were comparable to those of the Perry Preschool and Carolina Abecedarian Projects, supporting those programs' scalability. For twins, however, the program generated smaller positive short-term gains and negative age-18 impacts. These outcome differences arise from differences in parents' response to the program. A household production model suggests that the possibility of jointly supplying parenting to twins helps explain those differences.

School authorities, universities, and employers often schedule multiple tests on the same day or week, causing overlapping exam preparation and a dense testing schedule. This multitask learning can be intense, under pressure, and challenge the student's mental and physical perseverance. As a result, it can compromise performance relative to a more 'relaxed' schedule. This paper examines the consequences of multitasking for test scores and cheating in exams and its implications for the ability and gender cognitive gap. The empirical context is high-stakes exit exams in Israel, done at the end of high school. I leverage the empirical setting on two natural experiments to estimate the causal effect of this multitasking learning. The first exploits random variation in the number of weekly tests--the second hinges on days with multiple exams versus days with a single exam. The results show several important regularities. First, the number of exams in a day or a week harms test performance. Second, these effects are evidenced for high and low-ability students, boys and girls. They are much more extensive for immigrants than natives. Third, the harm of such multitasking is larger in tests later in the schedule, daily or weekly. Fourth, these effects are larger in tests of STEM subjects. Fifth, dense exams schedule increase the likelihood of students behaving dishonestly in exams.

College-educated mothers spend substantially more time in intensive childcare than less educated mothers despite their higher opportunity cost of time and working more hours. Using data from the 2010-2013 and 2021 waves of the Well-being Module of the American Time Use Survey, we investigate this puzzle by testing the hypothesis that college-educated mothers enjoy childcare more. We find that among all mothers, spending time in childcare is associated with higher positive feelings compared to spending time in other activities. However, college-educated mothers experience no more positive feelings and no fewer negative feelings during intensive childcare than other mothers. Moreover, college-educated mothers report substantially fewer positive feelings for time spent in management activities and substantially more negative feelings for time spent in educational activities with their child. Findings are robust to controlling for a rich set of covariates, mother fixed effects, and simulations to account for selection into intensive childcare.

Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a dissimilarity index to examine racial occupational segregation between 1980 and 2019, comparing Black and white workers with and without bachelor's degrees and by developing a Monte Carlo simulation, where we compare the observed levels of segregation to predicted levels of racial occupational segregation by education under race-neutral conditions. First, we find that considerable racial occupation segregation in the labor market persists today regardless of educational attainment and that observed segregation is substantially higher than would be expected at random, conditional on educational attainment, gender, and geography. We compare the types of occupations in which Black and white workers are disproportionately situated, and we show that this segregation has significant consequences for wage inequality between Black and white workers with and without four-year degrees. Overall, our results show that racial occupational desegregation has stalled in the past two decades despite rising educational attainment amongst Black workers.

While the direct impacts of minimum wage changes on employment have received considerable attention, these policy changes have the potential to impact skill attainment by changing the opportunity cost of college enrollment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students at public two-year institutions in response to increases in the minimum wage. The largest enrollment effects are seen for those students who are enrolled in part-time courses of study at community colleges. The effect of minimum wage changes on credential attainment is limited to modest effects for women at the associate degree level, suggesting that the changes primarily impact the enrollment of students who are unlikely to have been diverted from degree attainment.

We demonstrate the social efficiency of investing in high-quality early childhood education using newly collected data from the HighScope Perry Preschool Project. The data analyzed are the longest follow-up of any randomized early childhood education program. Annual observations of participant outcomes up to midlife allow us to provide a cost-benefit analysis without relying on forecasts. Adult outcomes on the participants' children and siblings allow us to quantify spillover benefits. The program generates a benefit-cost ratio of 6.0 (p-value = 0.03). Spillover benefits increase this ratio to 7.5 (p-value = 0.00).

How do college students and postsecondary institutions react to changes in skill demand in the U.S. labor market? We quantify the magnitude and nature of response in the 4-year sector using a new measure of labor demand at the institution-major level that combines online job ads with geographic locations of alumni from a professional networking platform. Within a shift-share setup, we find that the 4-year sector responds. We estimate elasticities for undergraduate degrees and credits centered around 1.3, generally increasing with time horizon. Changes in non-tenure-track faculty allocations and the credits they teach partially mediate this overall response. We provide further evidence that the magnitude of the overall response depends on both student demand and institutional supply-side constraints. Our findings illuminate the nature of educational production in higher education and suggest that policy efforts that aim to align human capital investment with labor demand may struggle to achieve such goals if they target only one side of the market.

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools' academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity. [Funding was provided by the Center for Labor Economics.]

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this issue, in large part due to a dearth of data. Here we present the results from analyzing 685,709 applications from Asian American and white students to a subset of selective U.S. institutions over five application cycles, beginning with the 2015-2016 cycle. The dataset does not include admissions decisions, and so we construct a proxy based in part on enrollment choices. Based on this proxy, we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian. We hope these results inform ongoing discussions on the equity of college admissions policies.

We study the distributional effects of remote learning. Our approach combines newly collected data on parental preferences with administrative data from Los Angeles. The preference data allow us to account for selection into remote learning while also studying selection patterns and treatment effect heterogeneity. We find a negative average effect of remote learning on reading (-0.14 SD) and math (-0.17 SD). Notably, we find evidence of positive learning effects for children whose parents have the strongest demand for remote learning. Our results suggest an important subset of students who currently sort into post-pandemic remote learning benefit from expanded choice.

This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state's accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a school's receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases adult criminal involvement. Accountability pressures also reduce the propensity of students' reliance on social welfare programs in adulthood and these effects persist at least until when individuals reach their early 30s. Further examination reveals that our results are consistent with an explanation related to improvements in human capital accumulation.

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

Using randomized control trials (RCTs) applied over time in different countries, we study how the economic environment affects how agents learn from new information. We show that as inflation has recently risen in advanced economies, both households and firms have become more attentive and informed about inflation, leading them to respond less to exogenously provided information about inflation and monetary policy. We also study the effects of RCTs in countries where inflation has been consistently high (Uruguay) and low (New Zealand) as well as what happens when the same agents are repeatedly provided information in both low- and high-inflation environments (Italy). Our results broadly support models in which inattention is an endogenous outcome that depends on the economic environment. [Additional funding was provided by the Fama-Miller Center and the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.]

We examine the mortality effects of a 1947 school reform in Japan, which extended compulsory schooling from primary to secondary school by as much as 3 years. The abolition of secondary school fees also indicates that those affected by the reform likely came from disadvantaged families who could have benefited the most from schooling. Even in this relatively favorable setting, we fail to find that the reform improved later-life mortality up to the age of 87 years, although it significantly increased years of schooling. This finding suggests limited health returns to schooling at the lower level of educational attainment.

Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked due to systemic disadvantages, these programs may enable students to bridge the gap and catch up to their peers. In this study, we examine the effects of a quota-type affirmative action policy on gaps in college outcomes between potential beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. Using comprehensive administrative data from a leading Brazilian university which implemented affirmative action in 2005, we find that compared to their non-quota peers, potential quota beneficiaries are less likely to progress smoothly through college and less likely to graduate, a result that is mostly driven by those who would not be admitted to the university otherwise. Notably, however, most of these differences shrink as the students progress through college, suggesting a catch-up effect between those groups. While potential quota students initially face challenges, resulting in a reduced course load in their early college years, they compensate by taking more credits in later years to ultimately graduate. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER).]

This paper develops and estimates an empirical framework that evaluates the impact of charter school choice on education quality in the aggregate. We estimate the model using student-level data from North Carolina. We find that North Carolina's lifting of its statewide charter school cap raised the average public school's value-added by around 0.01 standard deviations (on the student test score distribution). We calculate the total human capital returns of the expansion at above $100,000 per charter school enrollee. We further show that competition drives the aggregate gains; test score impacts on students induced into charter schools by the policy are negative.

We explore how much borrowers value student debt relief, in the setting of the federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TLF) program, and further document whether information and eligibility for this program affect teacher employment decisions. The program cancels between $5,000 and $17,500 in debt for teachers who remain employed in a high-need school for five consecutive years. Using both quasi-experimental evidence and a randomized control trial, we find that neither eligibility nor a targeted information intervention result in changes in teacher employment decisions, despite the presence of sizable student loan balances in our sample. Information was found, however, to increase application and receipt rates for teachers who had already accrued the five years of eligibility. Additional evidence from contingent valuation surveys suggests that teachers do in general value possible debt relief. Incorporating qualitative evidence from focus groups, we conclude that take-up may be constrained by program complexity and administrative barriers that involve knowing which schools qualify, tracking employment records, having employers sign off, and coordinating with loan servicers.

This paper studies how rewards based on class rank affect student effort and performance using a game-theoretic classroom competition model and data from the resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in the US. The paper finds that variation in the presence of strong or weak students changes the incentives and test scores of incumbent students depending on their ability group in accord with the competition model, with increases in the number of strong students lowering effort among strong and weak incumbents but raising the test scores of weak incumbents. The results suggest that competition induced by rank-based rewards within homogeneous ability groups lowers overall effort levels, while the presence of strong students directly augments the performance, but not the effort levels, of weak students despite the competition. The paper also rules out a number of alternative explanations for these school composition effects, including disruptions, teacher-initiated changes in curriculum in response to changing class composition, selective incumbent-student school exit, and endogenous responses of refugee location choices to school performance. [This report was funded by the China National Natural Science Foundation.]

Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. In this essay, we focus on two main issues. We start by examining how Black College students perform across HBCUs and non-HBCUs by looking at a relatively broad range of outcomes, including college and graduate school completion, job satisfaction, social mobility, civic engagement, and health. HBCUs punch significantly above their weight, especially considering their significant lack of resources. We then turn to the potential causes of these differences and provide a glimpse into the "secret sauce" of HBCUs. We conclude with potential implications for HBCU and non-HBCU policy.

Many observers argue that diversity in Economics and STEM fields is critical, not simply because of egalitarian goals, but because who is in a field may shape what is studied by it. If increasing the rate of majoring in mathematically-intensive fields among women is a worthy goal, then understanding whether women's colleges causally affect that choice is important. Among all admitted applicants to Wellesley College, enrollees are 7.2 percentage points (94%) more likely to receive an Economics degree than non-enrollees (a plausible lower bound given negative selection into enrollment on math skills and major preferences). Overall, 3.2 percentage points--or 44% of the difference between enrollees and non-enrollees--is explained by college exposure to female instructors and students, consistent with a wider role for women's colleges in increasing female participation in Economics.

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime.