Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. institutions of higher education began to address long-standing patterns of exclusion. Initial efforts to improve the access of black students to engineering education focused on six historically black engineering colleges, and evolved into a truly nationwide...

Does academic economic research produce material of scientific value, or are academic economists writing only for clients and peers? Is economics scholarship uniquely insular? We address these questions by quantifying interactions between economics and other disciplines. Changes in the impact of...

What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. Here, we introduce a new, overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in...

Roughly 25 percent of first-year college students do not return for a second year. This has led to a range of policies and interventions aimed at increasing college performance, persistence, and graduation. In this article, we assess whether cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) has the potential...

This study examines the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to war violence on cognitive and developmental outcomes, focusing on children in Afghanistan, a country deeply affected by prolonged violent conflict. Using data from the 2022 Afghanistan Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and...

Boys are less likely than girls to enter college, a gap that is often attributed to a lack of non-cognitive skills such as motivation and self-discipline. We study how being classified as gifted - determined by having an IQ score of 116 or higher - affects college entry rates of disadvantaged...

This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the outcomes of 10 and 11 year olds after controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family background characteristics. The results suggest that the mother's labor supply has deleterious effects on cognitive development,...

Young children in poor communities are spending more hours in non-parental care due to policy reforms and expansion of early childhood programs. Studies show positive effects of high-quality center-based care on children's cognitive growth. Yet we know little about the effects of center care...

This paper develops two methods for estimating the effect of schooling on achievement test scores that control for the endogeneity of schooling by postulating that both schooling and test scores are generated by a common unobserved latent ability. These methods are applied to data on schooling...

There is a wealth of research in psychology demonstrating that agents process information with the aid of categories. In this paper we study this phenomenon in two parts. First, we build a model of how experiences are sorted into categories and how categorization affects decision making. Second,...