Using data from BRIGHT, an integrated program that aims to improve school participation in rural communities in Burkina Faso, we investigate the impact of school subsidies and increased access to education on child work. Regression discontinuity estimates demonstrate that, while BRIGHT...

Many state governments impose tuition regulations on public colleges in pursuit of college affordability. How effective are these regulations? We use a modified event study design to study how colleges' ``sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and...

This paper shows mutually consistent evidence to support female advantage in education and disadvantage in labor markets observed in the Philippines. We set up a model that shows multiple Nash equilibria to explain schooling and labor market behaviors for females and males. Our evidence from...

This paper contributes to the important but small body of research on the role of private schools in Indian education. It uses a household dataset from India with a rich set of household covariates and student performance data on reading, writing, and mathematics. For both rural and urban India...

In their struggle to improve student learning, many developing countries are introducing school-based management (SBM) reforms that provide cash-grants to school councils. School councils are expected to work collaboratively and decide on the best use of the funds. In this paper, we study the...

This paper examines the relative labor market gains for first-time college students who entered the North Carolina Community College System in 2002–2003. We compare the returns to diplomas, certificates, and degrees to the returns to some college credits. The authors also investigate the...

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

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...

I examine the effects of a longer school year in Indonesia on grade repetition, educational attainment, employability, and earnings. I exploit an arbitrary rule that assigned students to a longer school year in Indonesia in 1978–1979, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. I find...