High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing...

This paper reports the results of a large, school-level randomized controlled trial evaluating a set of three informational interventions for young people choosing high schools in 473 middle schools, serving over 115,000 8th graders. The interventions differed in their level of customization to...

One-fifth of U.S. high school students report being bullied each year. We use internet search data for real-time tracking of bullying patterns as COVID-19 disrupted in-person schooling. We first show that, prepandemic, internet searches contain useful information about actual bullying behavior....

The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly-funded secondary school education and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus here is on the reasons for the high school movement' in American generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly...

Human capital accumulation and technological change were to the twentieth century what physical capital accumulation was to the nineteenth century -- the engine of growth. The accumulation of human capital accounts for almost 60% of all capital formation and 28% of the per capita growth residual...

Participation in Career Technical Education (CTE) programs has been proposed as a valuable strategy for supporting transition to independence among students with disabilities. We exploit a discontinuity created by admissions thresholds from a statewide system of CTE high schools. Our findings...

Dramatic fertility swings over the last 100 years have been the subject of large literatures in demography and economics. Recent research has claimed that the post-1960 fertility decline is exceptional enough to constitute a "Second Demographic Transition." The empirical case for a Second...

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the accessibility of abortion services and incidences of child maltreatment across the United States, using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the Myers abortion facility database from 2011...

We use estimates across all known "credibly causal" studies to examine the distributions of the causal effects of public K12 school spending on test scores and educational attainment in the United States. Under reasonable assumptions, for each of the 31 included studies, we compute the same...