We provide evidence that graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, originally intended to improve public safety, impact both high school completion and teen employment. Many teens use automobiles to commute both to school and to employment. Because school and work decisions are interrelated, the...

We provide evidence that graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, originally intended to improve public safety, impact human capital accumulation. Many teens use automobiles to access both school and employment. Because school and work decisions are interrelated, the effects of automobile-specific...

We provide evidence that graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws, originally intended to improve public safety, impact human capital accumulation. Many teens use automobiles to access both school and employment. Because school and work decisions are interrelated, the effects of automobile-specific...

Very few studies analyze the long-term educational effects of private secondary school attendance while controlling for socioeconomic status. In Québec, the second most populous Canadian province, twenty percent of students at this level are enrolled in private schools subsidized by the...

We study the effects of grade retention on secondary school performance by considering a change in Colombia's educative legislation. In 2010, the rule that forced schools to retain up to a 5% of students was abolished. Exploiting variation in schools' retention rates in a...

This research examines the temporal range of subliminal priming effects on complex behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were subliminally primed with words either related or unrelated to intelligence before completing a practice exam, administered 1 to 4 days before an actual course...

This paper evaluates a randomized controlled trial of a cash transfer program for the girls' education by studying the short-term academic achievement of 3,997 female students (9th–11th grade) across 124 classrooms in 33 public secondary schools in Malawi. Results show that students provided...

Non-cognitive skills programs may be an important policy option to improve the academic outcomes of adolescents. In this paper, we evaluate experimentally the EPIS program, which is based on bi-weekly individual or small-group non-cognitive mediation short meetings with low-performing students....

This paper argues that school grades cannot be interpreted solely as a reward for a given school performance, since they also reflect teachers' ratings of pupils. Grades therefore contain valuable information about pupils' own - usually unknown - ability. The incorporated assessment in grade...

Do investments in soft skills pay off in terms of student achievement? This paper evaluates a large private-sector program in this area, EPIS, based on individual and small-group sessions of mediators that seek to improve the non-cognitive skills (e.g. motivation, self-esteem, conscientiousness)...