Recent studies of US elite exam schools have yielded the startling conclusion that such schools improve neither educational achievement nor longer-term educational outcomes. Is the same true for exam schools elsewhere? The system in Turkey is ideal for investigating this question. There,...

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

There is no clear theoretical prediction regarding whether home computers are an important input in the educational production function. To investigate the hypothesis that access to a home computer affects educational outcomes, we conduct the first-ever field experiment involving the provision...

Using an originally constructed dataset that follows 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to the labor market, we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We exploit the...

Weaker retention of women in quantitatively oriented fields, particularly STEM* is widely seen in US higher education. This persistence gap is often explained by less generous grading in these fields and the conjectured tendency of female students to generally exhibit stronger "sensitivity" to...

Since the 1980s the United States has faced growing disinterest and high attrition from STEM majors. Over the same period, foreign-born enrollment in U.S. higher education has increased steadily. This paper examines whether foreign-born peers affect the likelihood American college students...

People rely on their experiences when making important decisions. In making these decisions, individuals may be significantly influenced by the timing of their experiences. Using administrative data, we study whether the order in which students are assigned courses affects the choice of college...

Recent empirical analyses reveal substantial differences in the choices of college majors between demographic and socio-economic groups that are further amplified upon students' adjustment of their educational choices in the course of studies. The best documented and salient are the differences...

Recent research has shown that females make classrooms more conducive to effective learning. We identify the effect of a higher share of female classmates on students' disruptive behavior, engagement, test scores, and major choices in disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged schools. We exploit the...