Increasing the postsecondary attainment rate of college-age youth is an important economic priority in the U.S. and in other developed countries. Yet little is known about whether different forms of public subsidy can increase degree completion. In this paper, we compare the impact of the...

This paper studies the demand for charter schools in Boston, Massachusetts, with an emphasis on comparative advantage in school choice. I model charter school application and attendance decisions in a generalized Roy selection framework that links students' preferences to the achievement gains...

The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs - including many STEM occupations - shrank by 3.3 percentage...

Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet random variation in school attendance is necessary to test the validity of VAMs, and to guide the selection of models for measuring causal effects of schools. In this paper, I use random assignment from a public...

Machines increasingly replace people in routine job tasks. The remaining tasks require workers to make open-ended decisions and to have "soft" skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. This paper documents growing demand for decision-making and explores the consequences...

This paper synthesizes what economists have learned about human capital since Becker (1962) into four stylized facts. First, human capital explains at least one-third of the variation in labor earnings within countries and at least half of the variation across countries. Second, human capital...

A central argument for school choice is that families value the freedom to exercise choice and can make wise decisions. This principle may underlie why lottery-based school evaluations, which exploit over-subscription due to excess demand, have almost always reported positive or zero achievement...

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of attendance at Boston's charter high schools on college preparation, college attendance, and college choice. Charter attendance increases pass rates on the high-stakes exam required for high school graduation in Massachusetts, with especially...

Estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. We explore student-level and school-level explanations for these differences using a large sample of Massachusetts charter schools. Our results show...