Launched in 2004, the Carolina Covenant combines grant-heavy financial aid with an array of non-financial supports for low-income students at an elite public university. We find that the program increased four-year graduation rates by about 8 percentage points for eligible students in the...

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. The U.S. evidence on this assumption has been inconclusive because of distortions from reporting error in household surveys. Following a British literature, we...

Much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination. Based on the legal definition, careful studies of loan denial rates, such as that done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston,...

This paper marshals available evidence from both the U.S. and other countries on the effects of private schools, peer effects, and competition to demonstrate that that any gains in overall student achievement from a large scale voucher program are at best likely to be small. Moreover, given the...

Despite the involvement of two-thirds of economists in it, the higher education industry remains incompletely understood. Among the topics related to higher education that invite further research are the rapid increase in college costs, the interaction of tenure and the end of mandatory...