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...

Value-added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers. Many school districts have adopted these methods and released the results publicly. In this paper, we study the release of value-added data in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Times newspaper to identify how...

Most public colleges and universities rely heavily on state financial support. As state budgets have tightened in recent decades, appropriations for higher education have declined substantially. Despite concerns expressed by policymakers and scholars that the declines in state support have...

For-profit providers are becoming an increasingly important fixture of US higher education markets. Students who attend for-profit institutions take on more educational debt, have worse labor market outcomes, and are more likely to default than students attending similarly-selective public...

Social programs and mandates are usually studied in isolation, but interaction effects could create spillovers to other public goods. We examine how health insurance coverage affects the education of students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the context of state-mandated private therapy...

Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

Parents make important choices for their children in many areas of life, yet the empirical literature on this topic is scarce. We study parents’ competitiveness choices for their children by combining two large-scale artefactual field experiments with high-quality longitudinal administrative...

We estimate doctor value-added and provide evidence on the distribution of physician quality in an entire country, combining rich population-wide register data with random assignment of patients to general practitioners (GPs). We show that there is substantial variation in the quality of...

Adverse economic shocks occur frequently and may cause individuals to reevaluate key life decisions in ways that have lasting consequences for themselves and the economy. These life decisions are fundamentally tied to specific periods of an individual's career, and economic shocks may therefore...