We develop a framework that may be used to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. This framework results in a simple formula showing that the "cream-skimming" effect is increasing in the degree of...

We extend the control function approach of Altonji and Mansfield (2018) to allow for multiple group levels and complementarities. Our analysis provides a foundation for causal interpretation of multilevel mixed effects models in the presence of sorting. In our empirical application, we obtain...

Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental...

We examine what determines the family income that men and women experience over their adult lives. To this end, we estimate a dynamic model of earnings, nonlabor income, fertility, marriage, and divorce. We use the model to address a number of important questions in labor and family economics,...

There is much public discussion but almost no evidence on the effects of high school curriculum on postsecondary education and on success in the labor market. I use the large variation in curriculum across US high schools to identify the effects on wages and educational attainment of specific...

This paper uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS overestimates the returns to degrees with high average earnings and underestimates...