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 analyze how intergenerational mobility and inequality would change relative to the status quo if dynasties had access to optimal insurance against low ability of future generations. Based on a dynamic, dynastic Mirrleesian model, we find that insurance against intergenerational ability risk...

Using data from CHIPS 1995-2013, we find polarization of employment from middle-income Skilled jobs to work in the Unskilled and Self-Employment job categories. This redistribution of employment is consistent with the automation of routine noncognitive tasks in the skilled sector as analyzed in...

There has been a resurgence in right wing and populist politics in recent years. A common element is a focus on immigration, an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the vilification of minorities. This in turn has the potential to lead to increases in societal hostility towards immigrants....

During COVID school closures, learning become mostly restricted to young people who had internet access at home. This paper examines internet access in India using National Sample Survey 2017-18. It probes the extent of inequality in young people's internet access across gender, caste, religion,...

We examine the effect of attending academically selective high schools on test scores, by leveraging administrative data that matches high school preferences of the population of urban middle school graduates in one Chinese prefecture in 2010 with high school student records. The standard...

This paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...