For decades, pundits, politicians, college administrators, and academics have lamented the dismal rates of civic engagement among students who enroll in courses and eventually major in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (i.e., STEM) fields. However, the research supporting this...

Names can convey information about race or ethnicity and therefore can be used to discriminate against protected groups; many researchers have demonstrated as much through audit studies. Yet few studies link life outcomes with names using observational data. We use administrative data from over...

Monthly government transfer programs create cycles of consumption that track the timing of benefit receipt. In this paper, we exploit state-level variation in the staggered timing of nutritional assistance benefit issuance across households to analyze how this monthly cyclicality in food...

We estimate whether students update their college application portfolios in response to large, unanticipated information shocks generated by the release of SAT scores -- a primary component of admissions decisions. Exploiting new population data on the timing of college selection and a policy...

This paper investigates the effects of high-speed Internet on students' college application decisions. We link the diffusion of zip code-level residential broadband Internet to millions of PSAT and SAT takers' college testing and application outcomes and find that students with access to...

We implement a regression discontinuity design using the continuous raw Advanced Placement (AP) exam scores, which are mapped into the observed 1-5 integer scores, for over 4.5 million students. Earning higher AP integer scores positively impacts college completion and subsequent exam taking....