College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed - since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional...

After increasing in the 1970s and 1980s, time to bachelor's degree has declined since the 1990s. We document this fact using data from three nationally representative surveys. We show that this pattern is occurring across school types and for all student types. Using administrative student...

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed - since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional...

Deciding how much to save for retirement can be complicated. Drawing on a field experiment conducted with the Department of Defense, we study whether such complexity depresses participation in an employer-sponsored retirement saving plan. We find that simplifying one dimension of the enrollment...

Information provision, choice simplification, social messaging, active-choice frameworks, and automatic enrollment all increase retirement savings. However, gauging the relative efficacy of these approaches is challenging because the supporting evidence spans widely different institutional...

This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents' eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent's enlistment in the Army increases their children's military service propensity by between 58% and...

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed - since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional...