This paper examines the competitive effects of a unique school choice program implemented in the late 1990s, Wisconsin's open enrollment program, which allows families to send their children to schools outside their home district. In contrast to other school choice programs, districts not only...

Failure in US high school courses is common, but little is known about its effects. This paper investigates the extent to which course repeaters in high school mathematics courses exert negative externalities on their course-mates. Using individual and school-specific course fixed effects to...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of females in the classroom on achievement of males and females. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to higher education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of females in...

This paper uses data on roommates from two different selective institutions to investigate the effect of peers on first-year performance, with a specific focus on the underlying mechanism. We compare measures of academic ability across student sub-groups by race, income, and gender, and across...

Investigation of peer effects on achievement with sample survey data on schools may mean that only a random sample of the population of peers is observed for each individual. This generates measurement error in peer variables similar in form to the textbook case of errors-in-variables, resulting...

Over the past decade, several state and federal policies have directed schools to mainstream English Language Learner (ELL) students into English-only instruction classrooms. While there is mixed evidence on the effects of these immersion policies on the ELL students, research examining...

An extensive literature exploring a range of peer influences on both academic and non-academic outcomes continues to produce contradictory evidence regarding the existence and magnitude of peer effects. Our results provide no evidence of peer effects in models where peer academic ability is...

In this paper, I study ability peer effects among teenagers. The identification relies on a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach where assignment into high-ability classes constitutes the source of identifying information. An important feature of this system is that both types of classes are...