This paper explores how non-college occupations contributed to the gender gap in college enrollment, where women overtook men in college-going. Using instrumental variation from routinization, we show that the decline of routine-intensive occupations displaced the non-college occupations of...

The standard economic model of occupational choice following a basic Roy model emphasizes individual selection and comparative advantage, but the sources of comparative advantage are not well understood. We employ a unique combination of Dutch survey and registry data that links math and...

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

While gender differences in labor force participation and wages have been studied extensively, gender gaps in cognitive skills among adults are not yet well understood. Using the PIAAC dataset, this paper presents novel findings on cognitive skill distributions by gender across 34 countries....

This paper studies an information intervention designed and implemented in the context of a school assignment mechanism in Mexico City. We find that providing students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds with feedback about their academic performance contributes to placing...

We analyze whether field of study assigned at age 16 impacts mental health in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits GPA cut-offs, we find that admission to the preferred study field improves mental health, lowering both the incidence of antidepressant prescriptions and...

Most colleges allow low-performing students to make a repeated attempt for the same course, but little is known about its implications for the academic success of these students. Using the variations in repetition induced by the cancellation and reversal of a university GPA policy to correct for...

First-generation university graduates have been found to face a series of disadvantages on their pathway to higher education and the labor market. We use unique, national level data on high achieving university graduates to attempt to disentangle the importance of lower prior attainment from...

This paper examines the idea that the increasing return to college is reducing intergenerational mobility by differentially impacting the investments in children by parents across education groups. A larger return to college will create stronger incentives to invest in children by parents with...

Recent research has shown that females make classrooms more conducive to effective learning. We identify the effect of a higher share of female classmates on students' disruptive behavior, engagement, test scores, and major choices in disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged schools. We exploit the...