Using a unique corporate loans dataset for entrepreneurs with small and microenterprises, this paper examines how educational attainment affects bank credit decisions and subsequent individual and firm outcomes. Our results highlight a "Matthew Effect," where an initial advantage is...

To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at...

I study the effects of the Future to Discover Project, a randomized experiment in which Canadian high school students were either invited to participate in career planning workshops or were made eligible for an $8,000 college grant. By matching the experimental data to post-secondary institution...

We find robust evidence that cohorts of graduates who enter college during worse economic times earn higher average wages than those who enter during better times. This difference is not explained by differences in economic conditions at the time of college graduation, changes in field of study...

The total social benefits of college education exceed the private benefits because the government receives a share of the monetary returns in the form of income taxes. We study the policy implications of this fiscal externality in an optimal dynamic tax framework. Using a variational approach we...

This paper studies the effect of income tax progressivity on the disproportionate usage of publicly funded higher education. We develop a rational choice model showing that more progressive tax systems increase poorer households' net fiscal benefit, making their children more likely to attend...

The reversing achievement gap across genders observed in many countries has led to a heated debate on the persistent gap in academia and other top fields. Using Turkish administrative data and the particular institutional characteristics, this pa- per aims to analyze the gender gap in...

Recent developments in the inequality literature has stressed the importance of inequality of opportunity as opposed to inequality of outcome. In this paper we investigate the presence of ex post inequality of opportunity in two measures of educational achievement for a representative sample of...

This paper investigates parental time investment in children prior to formal schooling as a source of intergenerational income persistence in the U.S. I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where lifetime income endogenously persists across generations through multiple channels. My model...

There is a well-established socioeconomic gradient in cognitive test scores for children. This gradient emerges at very early ages and there is also some evidence that it can widen as children age. We investigate this phenomenon with two longitudinal cohorts of Irish children who take such tests...