We study the effects of school autonomy using a randomized natural experiment in Seoul. Private and public schools subject to the equalization policy in Seoul admit students assigned randomly to them, receive equal government funding, charge identical fees, and use similar curricula, while...

We exploit the timing of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the geographical variation in mortality risks individuals faced across states to analyze reproduction decisions. The results of a difference-in-differences approach show evidence that fertility increased in states that are geographically...

This paper examines whether abortion legalization led to increased demand for pets in the United States. We compare women living in early-legalizing states, whose peak childbearing years occurred in the early 1970s, to women in other states and cohorts and estimate their likelihood of pet...

A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes...

How students’ non-school inputs respond to ability grouping may explain the currently mixed findings in the literature about the impacts of tracking. Using data from South Korea, where students are randomized into middle schools under the country’s equalization policy, but sorted into...

This paper examines the long-term effects of exposure to civil war and genocide on the educational attainment and labor productivity of individuals in Cambodia. Given the well-documented causal links between schooling and labor productivity, it is surprising that past studies show that civil...

This paper explains why suicidal tendency and test performance of teenagers may not be inversely related when individuals have reference-dependent preferences. Using panel survey data of South Korean secondary school students, I show that the relationship between suicidal ideation and test...