Lack of adequate childcare is a main reason women cite for not participating in the labor force. We investigate the effect of a reform that lengthened school schedules from half to full days in Chile - essentially providing zero-cost childcare - on different maternal labor participation...

We examine the effects of a compulsory schooling reform on child labor in Turkey, which extended the duration of schooling from 5 to 8 years while substantially improving the schooling infrastructure. We employ four rounds of Child Labor Surveys with a very rich set of outcomes. The reform...

Extant research on school entry and compulsory schooling laws finds that these policies increase the high school graduation rate of relatively younger students, but weaken their academic performance in early grades. In this paper, we explore the evolution of postsecondary impacts of the...

School entry regulations lead to differences in the age when children start school. While previous literature estimated the effects of age at school entry for compliers with school entry regulations, we look at non-compliers, namely those who enter school one year before the official entry date....

We know surprisingly little about the influence of race-blind school admissions on student outcomes. This paper studies a unique reform where a large, urban school district was federally mandated to adopt a race-blind lottery system to fill seats in its oversubscribed magnet schools. The...

This paper analyzes the impact of longer school schedules on children's 2nd grade reading comprehension skills in Chile. In a setting where families choose schools, we identify the causal effect of longer schedules with instrumental variables, using the local availability of full-day schools as...

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of...

Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior. Math scores of students in more-affected schools rose by 0.05...

Prior research shows reduced criminality to be a beneficial consequence of education policies that raise the school leaving age. This paper studies how crime reductions occurred in a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. These reforms...

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality "girl-friendly" primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20...