Women have historically been underrepresented in STEM majors and occupations, a gap that has persisted over time. There are concerns that this is related to academic choices made at an earlier age. The purpose of this paper is to examine how social environment affects women's STEM choices as...

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students' short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals differ in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

This paper examines the economic origins of the Islamic revival that took place in Egypt in the 1970-80s, and in Muslim societies more generally. We provide the first systematic evidence of a decline in social mobility among educated youth in Egypt. Developing a behavioral model of religion, we...

Research and policy discussion about the diverging fortunes of children from advantaged and disadvantaged households have focused on the skill disparities between these children – how they might arise and how they might be remediated. Analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of...

Recent advances in behavioral genetics have enabled the discovery of genetic scores linked to a variety of economic outcomes, including education. We build on this progress to demonstrate that the same genetic variants that predict educational attainment independently predict household wealth in...

We design and implement a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as shrinks...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of...

We estimate month-of-birth effects on cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as factors relevant to skill formation. Our estimates indicate that younger students in a given grade cohort have lower cognitive and noncognitive skills. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms, we also examine...