A growing body of evidence suggests that people exhibit large biases when processing information about themselves, but less is known about the underlying inference process. This paper studies belief updating patterns regarding academic ability in a large sample of students transitioning from...

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the US have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps - specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs - as a potential explanation for these patterns. For...

Teachers are an important source of information for traditionally disadvantaged students. However, little is known about how teachers form expectations and whether their expectations are systematically biased. We investigate whether student-teacher demographic mismatch affects high school...

We study the impact of higher education financing on the academic aspirations of teenagers and of their parents. We exploit a reform which introduced a large increase in the maximum university tuition fees and a more redistributive student loan system, both of which varied across the UK's...

The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of...

We investigate whether excessively optimistic beliefs may play a role in the persistent demand for doctoral and post-doctoral training in science. We elicit the beliefs and career preferences of doctoral students through a novel survey and randomize the provision of structured information on the...

Boys are doing worse in school than are girls, which has been dubbed "the Boy Crisis". An analysis of the latest data on educational outcomes among boys and girls reveals extensive disparities in grades, reading and writing test scores, and other measurable educational outcomes, and these...

While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the "gold standard" for impact evaluation, they face numerous practical barriers to implementation. In some circumstances, a randomized-encouragement design (RED) is a viable alternative, but applications are surprisingly rare. We discuss the...

This study presents the results of a randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of a shared-book reading (SBR) intervention that targeted children aged 4 living in socially mixed neighborhoods of the city of Paris. We selected a large, random sample of families and provided parents with...

This paper, based on a large-scale field experiment, tests whether a one-hour exposure to external female role models with a background in science affects students' perceptions and choice of field of study. Using a random assignment of classroom interventions carried out by 56 female scientists...