The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of the major components of the ACA (Medicaid expansion, subsidized Marketplace plans, and insurance market reforms) on disparities in insurance coverage after four years. We use data from the 2011-2017 waves of the American Community Survey...

This paper investigates which attributes of a Carnegie PhD-level institution predict the share of its undergraduate BA recipients that will earn a PhD. Four broad PhD fields are studied: humanities, physical sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences. We use restricted-access,...

We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15-17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity (RDD) methods, combined with dates on school year start and end dates by locality, we document several notable results. First, mothers are...

Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor's degree,...

We study within-family spillovers in college enrollment to show college-going behavior is transmissible between peers. Because siblings' test scores are weakly correlated, we exploit college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options....

We provide the first estimated economic impacts of students' access to an entire sector of public higher education in the U.S. Approximately half of Georgia high school graduates who enroll in college do so in the state's public four-year sector, which requires minimum SAT scores for admission....

Monthly government transfer programs create cycles of consumption that track the timing of benefit receipt. In this paper, we exploit state-level variation in the staggered timing of nutritional assistance benefit issuance across households to analyze how this monthly cyclicality in food...

We provide the first evidence that cumulative heat exposure inhibits cognitive skill development and that school air conditioning can mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million PSAT-takers show that hotter school days in the year prior to the test reduce learning, with...

Mapping continuous raw scores from millions of Advanced Placement examinations onto the 1 to 5 integer scoring scale, we apply a regression discontinuity design to understand how students' choice of college major is impacted by receiving a higher integer score despite similar exam performance to...

Students starting at a two-year college are much less likely to graduate with a college degree than similar students who start at a four-year college but the sources of this attainment gap are largely unexplained. In this paper we simultaneously investigate the attainment consequences of sector...