This paper examines the distributional impacts of direct college costs - that is, whether the response of educational decisions to college costs varies by student characteristics. The primary obstacle in estimating these effects is the endogeneity of schooling costs. To overcome this issue, I...

I study the size and sources of the monetary return to college achievement as measured by cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). I first present evidence that the return to achievement is large and statistically significant. I find, however, that this masks variation in the return across...

Does limited access to credit explain some of the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using data from two loan programs for college students in Chile. Both programs offer loans to students who score above...

This is a theoretical study of human-capital accumulation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

Working while studying at university increases the time-to-degree and may interfere with learning, but the acquired work experience may also improve employment opportunities and increase wages after the graduation. This study examines how university students' employment decisions affect their...

In this paper we evaluate the changes in the times-to-degree at the Finnish universities in the 1990s. In particular, we evaluate the effect of the 1992 student aid reform that was intended to shorten the duration of university studies. We find that the student aid reform had only a modest...

This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to...

The effect of a general school choice reform on student performance is studied in a Swedish institutional setting. A rich set of individual level data allows estimation of a value added specification, mitigating problems with omission of relevant variables. Increased school competition is shown...

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that...

Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous...