A growing number of students around the world receive private tutoring in academic subjects. Such tutoring is widely called shadow education because it mimics regular schooling as the school sector grows, so does the shadow; and as the curriculum in the school changes, so does the curriculum in...

This paper examines the impact of the implementation of a universal free school breakfast policy on meals program participation, attendance, and academic achievement. In 2003, New York City made school breakfast free for all students regardless of income, while increasing the price of lunch for...

This paper takes a new look at the determinants of cognitive ability. Using the results of the 2006 PISA survey for five Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay) it adopts an efficiency analysis perspective. Rather than selecting as inputs a few variables, it...

Using detailed individual-level data from public universities in the state of Ohio, I estimate the effect of various institutional expenditures on the probability of graduating from college. Using a competing risks regression framework, I find differential impacts of expenditure categories...

Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my...

This paper uses variation in the timing of parental layoff to identify the effect of parental job loss on higher education enrollment. Unlike research that compares laid-off workers to workers who do not lose their jobs, all families in our analysis experience a layoff at some point. The...

This study evaluates a comprehensive university access program that provides financial, academic and social support to low socioeconomic students using a natural experiment which exploits the time variation in the expansion of the program across high schools. Overall, we find positive treatment...

In this paper we confirm the universality of steadily rising education expenditures among OECD nations, as predicted by “Baumol and Bowen's cost disease”, and show that this trajectory of costs can be expected to continue for the foreseeable future. However, we find that while the level of...

We exploit presumably exogenous variation in the availability of college-educated workers at the province level produced by a reform that increased the supply of higher education to estimate human capital production externalities for Italian manufacturing firms. We show that when the potential...

A growing number of students are working while in college and to a greater extent. Using nationally representative data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I analyze the effect of working on grades and credit completion for undergraduate students in the United States. Strategies...