This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student's ordinal rank...

Standard observed characteristics explain only part of the differences between men and women in education choices and labor market trajectories. Using an experiment to derive students' levels of overconfidence, and preferences for competitiveness and risk, this paper investigates whether these...

Over the last decade, the economic literature has increasingly focused on the importance of gender identity and sticky gender norms in an attempt to explain the persistence of the gender gaps. Using detailed register data on the latest cohorts of Danish labour market entrants, this paper...

We study the relationship between political regimes and higher education and its implications for social mobility and political opposition in the context of the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. We show that the Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and...

Studying with higher ability peers increases student performance, yet we have little idea why. We exploit random assignment of students to classrooms and find positive peer effects on test scores. With very rich data on seventeen potential mechanisms, we then estimate how peer effects on...

Studying with higher ability peers increases student performance, yet we have little idea why. We exploit random assignment of students to classrooms and find positive peer effects on test scores. With rich data on nineteen potential mechanisms, we then estimate how effects on attitudes,...

The impact of children's early development status on parental labor market outcomes is not well established in the empirical literature. We combine an instrumental variable approach to account for the endogeneity of the development status with a model of non- random labor force participation to...

This paper evaluates the welfare consequences of limiting the number of choices in deferred acceptance mechanisms. I show that when the number of choices is capped, some agents must be strategic and that increasing the size of the submittable list can result in better matches, and therefore lead...

We study the effect of political regime change on higher education and its distributional and political consequences. We focus on the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large reduction...