Facing substantial financial pressure, many districts close schools in order to preserve solvency and improve student outcomes. Using a new longitudinal data set on all non-Cook County Illinois schools, we examine the determinants of high school closure decisions from 1991 through 2005. Our...

We examine the effect of a gifted and talented program in academic secondary education. Students are assigned based on a cutoff score in a cognitive aptitude test, which we exploit in a fuzzy regression discontinuity framework to identify program effects. We find that assigned students obtain...

A growing body of evidence suggests that people exhibit large biases when processing information about themselves, but less is known about the underlying inference process. This paper studies belief updating patterns regarding academic ability in a large sample of students transitioning from...

This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school, which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into fields of study, but also an accounting of individuals'...

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...

We conduct a study under 2,400 third grade students at three large secondary comprehensive schools to evaluate a gifted and talented (GT) program with selective program admission based on past achievement. We construct three complementary estimates of the program's impact on student achievement....

This article investigates whether increasing secondary education opportunities influences childbearing among young women in Brazil. We examine a novel dataset reflecting the vast expansion of secondary education in Brazil between 1997 and 2009 and exploit variation in the introduction of schools...

Facing substantial financial pressure, many districts close schools in order to preserve solvency and improve student outcomes. Using a new longitudinal data set on all non-Cook County Illinois schools, we examine the determinants of high school closure decisions from 1991 through 2005. Our...