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...

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....

While gender differences in the decision of what to study at undergraduate level are much studied, there is relatively little attention paid to subsequent study decisions of graduates. Given the increased importance of graduate education in recent decades, these decisions can have major labour...

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...

We investigate the impact of a change in the gender composition of the pool of candidates on the academic performance of women in an entrance exam. We use data from a natural experiment that altered the gender composition of the candidates for a nation-wide admission exam to a coding educational...

In 2015, Michigan increased it Career and Technical Education (CTE) funding and changed its funding formula to reimburse programsbased student progression through program curricula. Although this change nearly doubled program completion rates, student enrollment and persistence were unaffected;...

This paper studies the interaction between parental and public inputs in children's skill formation. We perform a longer-run follow-up study of a randomized controlled trial that increased preschool quality and initially improved skills significantly for children of all backgrounds. There is,...

Recent evidence on the gender wage gap shows that it has remained stagnant for those with a university degree and is the largest at the top of the earnings distribution. Many studies have explored institutional factors that contribute to the gender wage gap, but there is little evidence on the...