This paper is the first to estimate a causal effect of immigrant students' reading performance on their math performance. To overcome endogeneity issues due to unobserved ability, we apply an IV approach exploiting variation in age-at-arrival and the linguistic distance between origin and...

Using administrative data merged with a rich student survey collected during the summer of 2020, we document the immediate and short-term educational, financial, and personal burdens of New York city's low-income public university students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the closing of college...

Using an unbalanced panel of close to 12,000 academic records, and difference-in-differences models and event study analyses with individual fixed effects, we evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on lower-income students' academic performance during the spring 2020 semester relative to...

This paper explores the role of cultural attitudes towards women in determining math educational gender gaps using the epidemiological approach. To identify whether culture matters, we estimate whether the math gender gap for each immigrant group living in a particular host country (and exposed...

We study how native-immigrant (second generation) differences in educational trajectories and school-to-work transitions vary by gender. Using longitudinal Belgian data and adjusting for family background and educational sorting, we find that both male and female second-generation immigrants,...

An important immigration policy question is to identify the best criteria to select among potential migrants. At least two methodological problems arise: the host country's immigration policy regime endogeneity, and immigrants' unobserved heterogeneity. To address the first problem, we focus in...

This study investigates whether the choice for a vocationally versus a generally oriented higher education program entails a trade-off between higher employment chances and better matches at the start of the career (when opting for a vocational orientation) and a lower risk of bad match...

We investigate the impact of student work experience on later hiring chances. To completely rule out potential endogeneity, we present a field experiment in which various forms of student work experience are randomly disclosed by more than 1000 fictitious graduates applying for jobs in Belgium....

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term educational and employment impacts of an after-school program, the Quantum Opportunity Program, that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards...