This paper examines the impact of youth friendship links on student's own academic performance (grade point average) using the Add Health. We estimate a reduced form, high dimensional fixed effects model of within cohort or grade friendship links, and use this model to predict each student's...

Drawing on a unique data set that links information on all Wisconsin households receiving means-tested benefits with the educational performance of all Wisconsin public school students in these households, we estimate the effect of a family's initial receipt of housing assistance on students'...

This paper uses administrative data from the University of Texas-Austin to examine whether the number of same high school classmates at college entry influences college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003 we...

Using 10 years of enrollment data at four Texas public universities, this paper examines whether, to what extent, and in what ways high school attended contributes to racial and ethnic differences in college achievement. Like previous studies, we show that controlling for class rank and test...

In this paper, I examine the current policy of full inclusion of children receiving special education services into regular education classrooms. Specifically, this paper focuses on the policy's effects on the classmates of children with special needs, with a particular focus on classmates of...

We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effects of classmate characteristics on economic and social outcomes of students. The unique structure of the Add Health allows us to estimate these effects using comparisons across cohorts within...

A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially explain variation in the development and success of countries. Our paper extends evidence on this novel question by subjecting the hypothesis to an alternative context that eliminates many alternative...