Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals...

We investigate how the intensity of Ramadan affects educational outcomes by exploiting spatio-temporal variation in annual fasting hours. Longer fasting hours are related to increases in student performance in a panel of TIMMS test scores (1995-2019) across Muslim countries but not other...

We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ. We measure a family's SES by the mother's and...

Past research has shown that Hispanic students make test score gains relative to whites as they age through school; however, this finding stands in contrast to the experience of blacks, who show little change in their relative position over the same time frame. Distinguishing Hispanic students...

Our focus will be on the role of migration to the United States from a set of important European sending countries as a device for improving the human capital of the children and grandchildren of migrants as measured by their education. In this paper, we derive a new and conceptual more...

While a growing literature has analyzed the effects of parental migration on the educational outcomes of children left behind, this is the first study to highlight the importance of sibling interactions in such a context. Using panel data from the RUMiC Survey, we find that sibling influence on...

In the large empirical literature that investigates the causal effects of education on outcomes such as health, wages and crime, it is customary to measure education with years of schooling, and to identify these effects using the exogenous variation provided by school reforms increasing...

Although previous research has shown that homework improves students' academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students' homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which are less accurate than time-diary data. However, most time-diary data sets do not contain outcome...

Recent advances have led to the discovery of specific genetic variants that predict educational attainment. We study how these variants, summarized as a genetic score variable, are associated with human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We...

Using the OECD-studies PIAAC and ALL, this paper shows that teachers on average have better literacy and numeracy skills than other respondents in almost all of the 15 countries in the samples. In most countries, teachers outperform others in the bottom percentiles, while in some countries they...