Hierarchies in social identities have been found to be integrally related to divergences in economic status. In India, caste is one such significant social identity where continued discriminatory practices towards the lower castes have resulted in poor outcomes for them. While there is...

We exploit the variation in the admissions cutoffs across colleges of a leading Indian university in a regression discontinuity framework to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment, behavioral preferences, and Big Five personality. We find that...

We examine the effects of the large-scale construction of public universities in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s. We found that opening a local university increased the likelihood of obtaining higher education degrees and had long-lasting positive effects on labor market and marriage outcomes,...

This paper analyzes the factors underlying the evolution of the worldwide distribution of skills and their implications for global inequality. We develop and parameterize a two-sector, two-class, world economy model that endogenizes education and mobility decisions, population growth, and income...

The phenomenon of workers moving from a poor to a rich economy is high on the political agenda. When a worker moves to a richer economy, what is gained by the move? The empirical challenge in giving an answer stems from the difficulty to disentangle income differences from many other...

Existing empirical literature provides converging evidence that selective emigration enhances human capital accumulation in the world's poorest countries. However, the within-country distribution of such brain gain effects has received limited attention. Focusing on Senegal, we provide evidence...

International migration is a selective process that induces ambiguous effects on human capital and economic development in countries of origin. We establish the theoretical micro-foundations of the relationship between selective emigration and human capital accumulation in a multi-country...

We examine the causal impact of China's higher education expansion on labor market outcomes for young college graduates using China's 2005 1% Population Sample Survey. Exploiting variation in the expansion of university spots across provinces and high school cohorts and applying a...

This paper estimates the effects of a 2008 policy that eliminated tuition fees at public universities in Ecuador. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation across cohorts differentially exposed to the policy, as well as geographic variation in access to public...

We empirically examine whether there is discernable variation in the matriculation patterns of low-income students at public flagship institutions in the United States around changes in institutional financial-aid policies that target resident, low-income students with need-based aid. While...