Despite the widespread provision of retiree health insurance for public sector workers, little attention has been paid to its effects on employee retirement. This is in contrast to the large literature on health-insurance-induced “job-lock” in the private sector. I use the introduction of...

Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of...

A growing number of American states require that students who do not demonstrate basic reading proficiency at the end of third grade be retained and provided with remedial services. We exploit a discontinuity in the probability of third grade retention under Florida’s test-based promotion...

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students’ stated beliefs and attitudes. We exploit a major textbook reform in China that was rolled out between 2004 and 2010 with the explicit intention of shaping youths’ ideology. To measure its effect, we present evidence from a novel...

In many countries there is a considerable gender gap in enrolment for a bachelor’s degree in Economics, arguably an important stepping stone towards positions of influence in policy making and occupations paying relatively high wages. We investigate the sources of this gap by looking in detail...

Education yields substantial non-monetary benefits, but the size of these gains is still debated. Previous studies, for example, report contradictory effects of education and compulsory schooling on mortality - ranging from zero to large mortality reductions. Using data from 19 compulsory...

We use statewide administrative data from Florida to estimate the impact of attending public schools with different grade configurations on student achievement through grade 10. To identify the causal effect of structural school transitions, we use student fixed effects and instrument for middle...

Using pooled data on instructional time and student performance by subject, our study finds evidence for the school inputs-student achievement relationship for German states. This finding is robust both to the inclusion of state fixed effects and in an extensive extreme bounds analysis. It...

This paper analyzes housing market reactions to the release of previously unpublished information on school quality. Using the sharp discontinuity in the information environment allows us to study price changes within school catchment areas, thus controlling for neighborhood unobservables. We...

The aim of this paper is to study whether schooling choices are affected by social interactions. Such social interactions may be important because children enjoy spending time with other children or parents learn from other parents about the ability of their children. Identification is based on...