We study how a large household windfall affects sorting of relatively disadvantaged youth over high school tracks by exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of a welfare program in Mexico. The in-cash transfer is found to significantly increase the probability of selecting vocational...

This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement...

We use a new empirical strategy to test various measures of school effectiveness in England. Our approach exploits discontinuities in attendance probabilities that occur at unpredictable distance cutoffs used as tiebreakers in admissions processes for oversubscribed schools. We show that raw,...