Do second chances at a high-stakes admission exam yield long-term gains? Leveraging fifteen years of Chilean administrative data and an RDD, we examine the causal effects of retaking on educational and labor market trajectories. Narrowly missing a preferred program cutoff triggers a 44% increase...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degree rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global education...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degrees rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global...

In this paper, we show that gender gaps in performance observed in high-stakes exams, relative to low-stakes exams, are partially shaped by the context of exam preparation. We examine the role of exam preparation using data from French elite STEM higher education programs. First, we document a...

Using surveys with Danish students transitioning to secondary education, we study mental models of how gender and parental education shape academic performance. Students hold heterogeneous beliefs about performance gaps by gender and parental background, which appear to be shaped by...

We provide the first national descriptive analysis of the economic value of Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) degrees by examining graduates' early-career earnings, the costs of completing these programs, and the alignment between field of study and subsequent employment. Using...

We estimate the effect of receiving a higher grade on an academic high school exit exam on labor-market outcomes in adulthood. Identification is based on comparing students on different sides of grade cutoffs. Using nationwide Finnish register data, we find that better grades lead to higher...

South Africa's education system remains shaped by a legacy of colonialism and apartheid, with persistent racial disparities in attainment despite multiple post-1994 reforms. Using wave 5 of the National Income Dynamics Study, this paper examines intergenerational education mobility across...

Inequality of opportunity is a critical issue that significantly impacts the socioeconomic landscape. Understanding the variations in income and educational attainment has become increasingly important, as these disparities are often shaped by social determinants such as individual effort and...

This paper provides the first evidence from a developing-country setting on the long-term educational impacts of early-life exposure to a major environmental regulation. We study China's 1998 Two Control Zones policy and implement a difference-in-differences design comparing adjacent birth...

Vor dem Hintergrund des demografischen Wandels wird es immer wichtiger, dass möglichst alle jungen Menschen in Deutschland zur Fachkraft ausgebildet werden. Ausgangspunkt hierfür ist ein erfolgreicher Besuch der allgemeinbildenden Schulen, wobei insbesondere der nicht-gymnasiale Bereich der...

How does being over- or underqualified at the beginning of a worker's career affect skill acquisition, retention, and promotion? Despite the importance of mismatch for the labor market, self-selection into jobs has made estimating these effects difficult. We overcome endogeneity concerns in the...

This paper considers the impacts of grades and information on gender gaps in college major and college dropout rates at a large public flagship university. Observational and experimental results suggest women are more responsive to introductory economics grades when deciding whether to major in...

Place shapes the educational attainment of children, yet the underlying reasons remain poorly understood. In this paper, I investigate the role of spatial differences in educational signals received by students. Using Dutch administrative data combined with high-stakes national exam scores, I...

This study examines the effects of remedial courses in high school on postsecondary outcomes using a regression discontinuity design and explores the mechanisms behind these effects. I find that being placed in the remedial schedule and taking an additional remedial course in high school reduces...

This study examines the consequences of college students pursuing degree programs that do not align with the tracks and strands they selected in senior high school. We utilize a unique dataset that links admissions and enrollment records from the University of the Philippines Diliman to...

In many parts of the world, children with disabilities continue to face exclusion from education. This educational disparity is particularly pronounced in African countries, where disability legislation is often absent. In our sample, disability emerges as the strongest predictor of low...

This paper investigates the long- and short-term effects of geographical proximity to universities on educational attainment in Nigeria. We relate individuals level of schooling obtained from three rounds of the Nigeria's Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS) to spatial distance to...

Investment in both public and private education is aimed at achieving socioeconomic goals, including the reduction of poverty. While a large body of evidence has established a clear negative relationship between education and poverty, policymakers are often in disagreement about the returns to...

Using Italian data on the universe of mandatory tests conducted in a low-stakes setting without air conditioning, we investigate the effect of temperature on student performance, with a focus on how manipulation distorts causal estimates of temperature effects on test scores. While high...

In many countries, subsidies towards higher education and financial aid to students from poorer backgrounds have reduced socio-economic status (SES) gaps in undergraduate study. The increasing importance of graduate studies that are typically more expensive may, however, provide a new avenue for...

Many nations have experienced both rising education levels and declining marriage rates. However, cross-sectional comparisons within countries often indicate that more highly educated individuals are more likely to be married. Economic theory suggests ambiguous causal effects of education on...

Campus closures due to COVID19 created uneven student-level exposures to the challenges of home-based virtual learning. Using university administrative data, and exogenous class-level differences in pre-pandemic on-campus housing assignments for parallel trend validation, this paper unpacks...

We estimate the effects of being over- or underqualified for a job using quasi-random assignment of new enlistees to over 130 different jobs in the US Air Force. Being overqualified causes higher attrition, both during technical training and afterward when individuals are working in their...

This paper studies the possible existence of a Samaritan's Dilemma associated with in-kind transfers in the form of distribution of free books and uniforms to elementary school students in India. Using propensity score matching methods, we show that despite the transfer being in-kind, there are...

Leveraging administrative data from the University of Iceland, which cover more than 60% of the undergraduate population in the country, we examine how home exams and peer networks shape grades around the COVID-19 crisis. Using difference-in-difference models with a rich set of fixed effects, we...

This paper examines the long-term effects of childhood vaccination on educational and health outcomes. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey, we leverage the variation in timing and quality of the Village Midwife Program's implementation in the 1990s as a source of vaccination access...

This paper proposes the application of an existing measure in a new context. Specifically, we adapt a measure originally proposed to characterize the degree of educational assortative mating to measure relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait and inequality of opportunity....

Entrepreneurship is essential for boosting economic growth, fostering innovation, and providing employment in emerging countries like Pakistan, where the middle class is still growing. Pakistan's entrepreneurship ecosystem has immense potential but faces significant challenges. The study...

Leveraging administrative data from the University of Iceland, which cover more than 60% of the undergraduate population in the country, we examine how home exams and peer networks shape grades around the COVID-19 crisis. Using difference-in-difference models with a rich set of fixed effects, we...