We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...

The fundamental purpose of university geographic clustering is to gather resources through "agglomeration" to improve the performance of higher education and scientific research. However, it has been debated whether university clusters can achieve the latter goal. With the help of the...

This chapter presents evidence of the challenges faced by women and underrepresented minorities in Economics. It, first, examines the demographics of the economics profession, highlighting significant disparities in representation. Despite some progress, under representation remains prevalent at...

Population Economics (PopEc) covers a number of topics in Economics, as well as in Demography, Labor Studies, Sociology, etc. For example, the economic determinants of population change and demographic behavior covers topics such as household formation, marriage and divorce, fertility, gender,...

We estimate the causal effect of exposure to math during high school on university major choice and performance, using a unique administrative dataset of 1,396 twins extracted from the entire student population enrolled between 2011 and 2021 at an Italian university. We apply a Twin Fixed Effect...

The affordability of public higher education and, by extension, public higher education funding, is an important concern to prospective students and their parents as well as to policymakers. Our study examines the allocation of constant dollar per-student state appropriations across four-year or...

We assess whether a light-touch intervention can increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in undergraduate Economics. We randomly assigned over 2,200 students a message with basic information about the Economics major; the basic message combined with an emphasis on the rewarding careers or...

University students' smartphone use has recently been shown to negatively affect their academic performance. Surprisingly, research testing the empirical validity of potential mechanisms underlying this relationship is very limited. In particular, indirect effects of negative health consequences...

We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one's parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we...

We investigate the gender gap in Economics among bachelor's and master's grad- uates in Italy between 2010 and 2019. First we establish that being female exerts a negative impact on the choice to major in Economics: at the bachelor level, only 73 women graduate in Economics for every 100 men,...