Banking reforms--that reduced interest rates--boosted college enrollment rates among able students from middle class … families. We define "able" students as those with learning aptitude scores in the top two-thirds of the U.S. population. We …

random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry …. Among students enrolled in the poorest third of schools, the effect is 7.3 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the … likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM …

We evaluate the effects of high school exit exams on high school graduation, incarceration, employment and wages. We … relatively modest effects of high school exit exams except on incarceration. Exams assessing academic skills below the high … school level have little effect. However, more challenging standards-based exams reduce graduation and increase incarceration …

This paper estimates the sensitivity of students' college application decisions to a small change in the cost of … rose substantially while the fraction sending three fell by an offsetting amount. Students simultaneously sent their scores …-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that by inducing low-income students to attend more selective colleges, the policy change significantly …

estimates of the effects of exam school attendance on inframarginal applicants. These estimates suggest that the causal effects … of exam school attendance for 9th grade applicants with running variable values well away from admissions cutoffs differ …

substantial positive impacts of double-dose algebra on credits earned, test scores, high school graduation and college enrollment … students with below average reading skills, emphasizing the need to target interventions toward appropriately skilled students. …

Value-added models (VAMs) are increasingly used to measure school effectiveness. Yet random variation in school … schools. In this paper, I use random assignment from a public school choice lottery to test the predictive power of VAM … specifications. In VAMs with minimal controls and two or more years of prior data, I fail to reject the hypothesis that school …