Strategic incentives may lead to inefficient and unequal provision of public services. A prominent example is school admissions. Existing research shows that applicants "play the system" by submitting school rankings strategically. We investigate whether applicants also play the system by...

Our study focuses on exploring the impact of air pollution on household investment in children's education in China. Air pollution poses a significant risk to some cities in northern China. We have used panel data from secondary schools in Shandong Province in 2017 and 2020 and discovered that a...

Public policies often target individuals but within-family externalities of such interventions are understudied. Using a regression discontinuity design, we document how a third grade retention policy affects both the target children and their younger siblings. The policy improves test scores of...

We provide estimates for the effect of attending a Faith school on educational achievement using a census of primary school pupils in England. We argue that there are no credible instruments for Faith school attendance in this context. Instead, we partially control for selection into religious...

The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the macroeconomic performance across regions. However, despite the strong theoretical support for this claim, empirical evidence has been not very convincing, probably because of the low quality of the data. This paper...

We use Italian municipality data on education and voter participation in national elections to estimate the effect of schooling on voter turnout. By adopting a fixed effect instrumental variable identification strategy, we find that education reduces voter turnout, more so in municipalities with...

Because accountability may improve the comparability that is compromised by lenient grading, we compare exit exam outcomes in the same schools before and after a policy change that increased teacher accountability by anchoring grading scales. In particular, using a large administrative dataset...

This paper examines how college students in the United States altered their college major decisions during the energy boom and bust of the 1970s and 1980s. We focus on petroleum engineering and geology, two majors closely related to the energy industry. We find strong evidence that the energy...

Remediation has long been a costly way to address the misalignment between K-12 and higher education. In 2011, the California State University (CSU), the nation's largest public four-year university system, enacted Early Start, requiring students needing remediation to enroll in such courses in...

What determines human beings' decisions to donate money to a charity? Using a nationally representative survey of the Japanese population, we demonstrate that having been taught by a female teacher in their first year of school makes individuals more likely to donate to charities following...