We model schooling as a sequential process and examine why some children are left behind. We focus on the factors that explain selection at early stages of the education system. Our findings for Uruguay suggest that long-term factors, such as parental background or ethnicity matter across all...

We use rich data on a cohort of English adolescents to analyse the long-term effects of experiencing bullying victimisation in junior high school. The data contain self-reports of five types of bullying and their frequency, for three waves of the data, when the pupils were aged 13 to 16 years....

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 estimates the effect of exposure to teacher pay-for-performance programs on adult outcomes. We construct a comprehensive data set of schools which have implemented teacher performance pay programs across the United States since 1986, and use our data to calculate the fraction of...

The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

We study the effects of grade retention on secondary school performance by considering a change in Colombia's educative legislation. In 2010, the rule that forced schools to retain up to a 5% of students was abolished. Exploiting variation in schools' retention rates in a...

A large literature documents that childhood health shocks have lasting negative consequences for adult outcomes. This paper demonstrates that the adversity of childhood physical disability can be mediated by individuals' educational and occupational choices, which reflect their comparative...

I study whether exposure to teachers' stereotypes, as measured by the Gender-Science Implicit Association Test, affects student achievement. I provide evidence that the gender gap in math performance substantially increases when students are assigned to teachers with stronger gender stereotypes....

This paper studies how different demographic groups respond to incentives by comparing performance in the GRE examination in high and low stakes situations. The high stakes situation is the real GRE examination and the low stakes situation is a voluntary experimental section of the GRE that...

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...