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...

This paper studies the relationship between the creative abilities of study peers and academic achievement. We conduct a novel large scale field experiment at university, where students are randomized into work groups based on their score on a creativity test prior to university entry. We first...

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...

This study of the emergence of inequality during the early years is based upon a comparative analysis of children at the age of about five years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. We study a series of child outcomes related to readiness to learn, focusing on...

We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school- attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of...

This empirical research note documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance with respect to innovative activities (outlays and employment in research and development (R&D)) for a large representative sample of...