We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father’s...

In recent years, many states, including California, Texas, and Oregon, have changed admissions policies to increase access to public universities for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A key concern, however, is how these students will perform. This paper examines the relationship...

We consider the effects of student ability, college quality, and the interaction between the two on academic outcomes and future earnings using data on two cohorts of college enrollees drawn from the NLSY-79 and the NLSY-97. We find that student sorting has increased modestly between cohorts,...

The Great Recession brought large increases in unemployment and college enrollment; we explore how changing labor market conditions affected the decision to enroll, focusing on the role of state-specific dimensions of Unemployment Insurance (UI) policy. We measure the enrollment response to...

The structure and functioning of the market of higher education in the United States possess distinctive if not puzzling features such as the wide spectrum of institutional arrangements and sources of funding, stark segmentation in levels of selectivity and instructional resources, and high...

What happens when college students are not able to enroll in the courses they want? We use a natural experiment at Purdue University in which first-year students are conditionally randomly assigned to oversubscribed courses. Compared to students who are assigned a requested course, those who are...

The advent of the internet, and more recently of artificial intelligence (AI), has challenged academic and other institutions to ensure ethical practices and reward/promote true merit. The borderless and relatively anonymous nature of the internet creates policing challenges, leading to the...

State governments provide grants to students to subsidize college attendance. In response, colleges can adjust their tuition, aid policies, and admission standards, affecting equilibrium enrollment and pass-through of aid to students. To quantify demand- and supply-side responses, I develop a...

We use a change in Iceland’s education system as a natural experiment to measure the effect of years spent in upper secondary school on subsequent first year outcomes at university. The duration of Iceland´s upper-secondary education was shortened by one year through compression of the...

We study whether female students benefit from being taught by female professors, and whether such gender match effects differ by class size. We use administrative records of a German public university, covering all programs and courses between 2006 and 2018. We find that gender match effects on...