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 …

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 …

tried to integrate schools. Today, district-wide choice allows Boston and New York students to enroll far from home, perhaps …

not detectable by existing mean-based tests. Beliefs about future income are found to become more accurate as 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 …