How do students' earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and non-FiF students. Our data can...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruptions to education, with school closures affecting over one billion children. These closures, aimed at reducing virus transmission, resulted in significant learning losses, particularly in mathematics and science. Using United States data from TIMSS,...

Using Israeli data, we establish that the interaction between school entrance age (SEA) policy and youth employment laws increases high school dropout rates among students who start school older - particularly males. This is because these students become eligible for employment at an earlier...

Many studies have documented that a phonics approach is an essential component in the teaching of reading for beginning readers, especially for students at risk of reading disabilities. We study whether phonics approaches, as indicated by the choice of basal readers (materials for the initial...

The 1924 Immigration Act excluded immigrants from economically developing countries to the point of their near total exclusion. Forty years later, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated most discriminatory county-of-origin barriers. America's doors opened and immigration from...

We use data on Latino children in the United States who have been randomly assigned calculation tests in English or Spanish to check for the so-called bilingual advantage, the notion that knowing more than one language improves individuals' other cognitive skills. After controlling for different...

This paper is the first to provide, in the European context, credible causal estimates for the impact on educational achievement of a means-tested programme that subsidises school lunches. We use administrative data from the city of Barcelona for the whole universe of applications to the...

This study explores the preference for remote work by sending thousands of randomized messages to tutors advertising on an online platform across Greece. The messages requested either in-person or online tutoring. Requests for online lessons were roughly 50 percent more likely to receive a...

In this paper, we explore the interplay between personality traits, socio-emotional skills, and key life outcomes across education, employment, social connectedness, health, and civic participation. Drawing on a rich body of research, we highlight the significant impact of socio-emotional...

We estimate the causal effect of exposure to math during high school on university major choice and performance, using a unique administrative dataset of 1,396 twins extracted from the entire student population enrolled between 2011 and 2021 at an Italian university. We apply a Twin Fixed Effect...