While substantial recent attention has been paid to understanding the determinants of educational outcomes, little is known about the causal impact of the most fundamental input in the education production function - students’ study effort. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of...

Previous papers which examine the importance of peer effects using exogenous variation in college roommates have found only very limited evidence that a student’s first year grade performance is influenced by the observable academic characteristics of his/her roommate. One possible explanation...

In two recent cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court examined whether race should be allowed to play an explicit role in the admission decisions of schools. The primary argument in these court cases and others has been that racial diversity strengthens the quality of...

Despite an increased awareness of the policy importance of understanding the determinants of education outcomes, knowledge of the relationship between education outcomes and perhaps the most basic input in the education production process -- students' study time and effort -- has remained...

Unique new data from a college with a mandatory work-study program are used to examine the relationship between working during school and academic performance. Particular attention is paid to the importance of biases that are potentially present because the number of hours that are worked is...

Due primarily to the difficulty of obtaining ideal data, much remains unknown about how college majors are determined. We take advantage of longitudinal expectations data from the Berea Panel Study to provide new evidence about this issue, paying particular attention to the choice of whether to...

Issues related to the schooling attainment of children from low income families arise frequently in current education policy debates. In part due to a recent increase in the disparity between the wages of college graduates and the wages of individuals with less than a college degree, there has...

Motivated by the reality that the bene?ts of diversity on a college campus will be mitigated if interracial interactions are scarce or super?cial, previous work has strived to document the amount of interracial friendship interaction and to examine whether policy can influence this amount. In...

This paper complements the work of Sacerdote (1999) and Zimmerman (1999) by examining peer effects in a context where many students are from the types of disadvantaged backgrounds that are often the focus of education policy. The paper finds strong evidence of peer effects for females and...

We estimate a dynamic learning model of college dropout, taking advantage of unique expectations data to greatly reduce our reliance on standard assumptions. Our simulations show that forty-five percent of dropout in the first two years of college can be attributed to what students learn about...