School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish … ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics … estimate impacts on college attendance and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these …

best viewed as the end result of a learning process. We find that students enter college as open to a major in math or … science as to any other major group, but that a large number of students move away from math and science after realizing that … because students realize that their ability in math/science is lower than expected rather than because students realize that …

a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and … their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of both children while the spillover is up to 30% of the target … child effect size. The effects are particularly pronounced in families where one of the children is disabled, for boys, and …

better than third generation immigrants. Among first generation immigrants, the earlier the arrival, the better the students … tend to perform. These patterns of findings hold for both Asian and Hispanic students, and suggest a general pattern of …

This study examines the effects of negative equity on children's academic performance, using data on children attending … selection into initial mortgage terms. In contrast to the existing literature on foreclosure and children's outcomes, we find … that Florida students with the highest risk of negative equity exhibit significantly higher test score growth. These …

affirm that marginal returns to education among children of less-educated parents are as high and perhaps much higher than … education and earnings than other men. The education and earnings gains are concentrated among men with poorly-educated parents …

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at … of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do. The data collection and analysis are based directly … that students enter school quite optimistic/interested about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students …

school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using … composition, income, and region. We find robust evidence that the black-white test score gap is higher in more segregated cities …

disadvantaged students to attend private schools of their choice. We exploit random assignment of LSP vouchers at oversubscribed …