Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges -- which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families -- increase the socioeconomic diversity of America's leaders by...

We study the impact of a public school choice lottery in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools on college enrollment and degree completion. We find a significant overall increase in college attainment among lottery winners who attend their first choice school. Using rich administrative data on peers,...

We study the impact of the end of race-based busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools ("CMS") on academic achievement, educational attainment, and young adult crime. In 2001, CMS was prohibited from using race in assigning students to schools. School boundaries were redrawn dramatically to...

We study the impact of accountability pressure in Texas public high schools in the 1990s on postsecondary attainment and earnings, using administrative data from the Texas Schools Project (TSP). Schools respond to the risk of being rated Low-Performing by increasing student achievement on...

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit institutions account for the majority of...

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...

This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on the macroeconomic implications of human capital theory. I begin with a review of the canonical model of education and the wage structure pioneered by Tinbergen (1975) and developed more fully by Goldin and Katz (2007). I also review...