Previous findings on (fleeting) relative age effects in school suggest that, given innate ability, too few younger and too many older students attend academic tracks. Using a regression discontinuity design around school-specific admission thresholds, we estimate the cognitive and non-cognitive...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation, we find a strong positive impact on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills, we find the...

In an influential study, Mas and Moretti (2009) find that "worker effort is positively related to the productivity of workers who see him, but not workers who do not see him". They interpret this as evidence that social pressure can reduce free riding. In this paper we report an attempt to...

Studies on the determinants of the demand for higher education typically emphasizethe relevance of socio-economic factors, but leave the spatial dimensions of the prospectivestudents’ university choices largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the determinantsof university entrance...

We use the method of Dominitz and Manski (1996) to solicit anticipated wagedistributions for continuing to a Master degree or going to work after completing theBachelor degree. The means of the distributions have an effect on intention to continue aspredicted by theory. The dispersions in these...

The aim of this study is to analyze the effectiveness of early entrepreneurship education. To this end, we conduct a randomized field experiment to evaluate a leading entrepreneurship education program that is taught worldwide in the final grade of primary school. We focus on pupils' development...

Exploiting a unique policy reform in Egypt that reduced the number of years of compulsory schooling, we show how it unexpectedly increased education attainment as more students chose to complete the next school stage. This impact is almost entirely driven by girls from more disadvantaged...

Social interactions are generally thought to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper we exploit detailed friendship nominations in the US Add Health data, and extend the Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR) model to deal with (i) endogenous peer selection, and...

Recent studies for primary and secondary education find positive effects of the share of girls in the classroom on achievement of boys and girls. This study examines whether these results can be extrapolated to post-secondary education. We conduct an experiment in which the shares of girls in...

We investigate the effect of introducing information about peer portfolios in an experimental Arrow-Debreu economy. Confirming the prediction of a general equilibrium model with inequality averse preferences, we find that peer information leads to reduced variation in payoffs within peer groups....