This paper investigates the determinants of college attrition in a setting where individuals have imperfect information about their schooling ability and labor market productivity. We estimate, a dynamic structural model of schooling and work decisions, where high school graduates choose a...

In this paper we develop a model to estimate the return to college major and to understand why students appear to give up part of their earnings potential by selecting less profitable majors. Starting from the empirical evidence that individuals who work in a job related to their major field of...

At state and national levels, black students are more likely to be suspended from school, and conditional on misbehavior, receive stiffer penalties when compared with white students. Racial bias is often cited as a primary contributor to these gaps. Using infraction data from North Carolina, I...

In the examination of the determinants of educational choices, little attention has been devoted to the relationship between family income and the quality of higher education. Using the 1979 and 1997 waves of the NLSY, we show that family income significantly affects the quality of higher...

The levels and growth achievement functions make extreme and diametrically opposed assumptions about the rate at which teacher inputs persist. I first show that if these assumptions are incorrect, teacher value-added estimates can be significantly biased. I then develop a tractable, cumulative...

The use of finite mixture distributions to control for unobserved heterogeneity has become increasingly popular among those estimating dynamic discrete choice models. One of the barriers to using mixture models is that parameters that could previously be estimated in stages must now be estimated...