We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study which attributes characterize a top-scoring (four-star) publication in Economics and Econometrics. We frame the analysis as a classification problem and, using information in official documents, derive conditions to infer the...

We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study the attributes of top-scoring (four-star) publications in Economics and Econometrics. Although official documents contain aggregate scores for each institution, we show how these aggregates can be used to infer the score awarded...

This study describes how minority enrollment probabilities respond to changes in admission policies from affirmative-action to merit-only programs and then to percentage plans when the demographic composition of the potential pool of applicants is also shifting. It takes advantage of admission...

The effect of a general school choice reform on student performance is studied in a Swedish institutional setting. A rich set of individual level data allows estimation of a value added specification, mitigating problems with omission of relevant variables. Increased school competition is shown...

How does the financial aid allocation mechanism affect student behavior? We provide a framework for quantifying the impact of financial aid on student debt, academic capital, and labor market outcomes. We specify and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of simultaneous education, work, and...

This paper studies the effects of school organisation on short- and long-run pupil outcomes, exploiting a policy change that reorganised Swedish middle school education. The reorganisation induced pupils to remain in small local schools throughout grades 1-9, as opposed to making a transition to...

In this paper, we examine whether adult education delays retirement and increases labour force participation among the elderly, a mechanism suggested in the OECD strategy for 'active ageing' and the 'Lisbon strategy' of the EU. Using register data from Sweden, we analyse transcripts from adult...

We quantify the causal effect of schooling on cognitive skills across 21 countries and the full distribution of working-age individuals. We exploit exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by a broad set of institutional reforms affecting different cohorts of individuals in...

This study examines the effects of super-fast internet connections on the academic achievement of students in upper secondary school. We link detailed register data on around 250,000 students to local levels of access to optic fiber broadband and estimate the effect of broadband on student GPA....

This paper uses spatial variations in the enrolment rate of Tunisian pupils in 1931 to estimate the weight of colonial history on medium- and long-run educational attainment. We assemble a new dataset on the location of public primary schools and the number of pupils and teachers, together with...