Schools are increasingly restricting cellphones worldwide amid concerns about achievement and mental health, yet causal evidence on school-level bans remains mixed. We examine cellphone restrictions in Chile before the pandemic, where teacher discretion over cellphone use generated...

Exceptional talent accounts for a disproportionate share of innovation, yet many individuals with exceptional ability may never realize their potential. Whether expanding access to advanced training generates learning gains remains an open question. We study this using a randomized controlled...

We study how labeling of neighborhoods affects the performance and sorting of young residents at the junction of enrolling in high school. Exploiting the release of a much publicized official situation report on carefully delineated troubled neighborhoods in Sweden we estimate the effect of this...

Opportunity costs are central to economic decision-making but often neglected. In a pre-registered experiment with 2,222 German university freshmen, one treatment provides salary information; another additionally frames it as the opportunity cost of delayed graduation. Only the opportunity cost...

Do second chances at a high-stakes admission exam yield long-term gains? Leveraging fifteen years of Chilean administrative data and an RDD, we examine the causal effects of retaking on educational and labor market trajectories. Narrowly missing a preferred program cutoff triggers a 44% increase...