This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of early school entry on educational outcomes using standardized test score data on Italian pupils. The empirical procedure is designed to disentangle the effect of regular entry (Gift of Time) from possible unobserved confounding...

We examine the effect of participation in 4-H, the largest youth development program in the United States, on standardized test scores. We do this by utilizing grade-level longitudinal data on Florida's school districts from the Florida Department of Education combined with 4-H participation...

A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the “biological clocks” of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities...

College GPAs in the United States rose substantially between the 1960’s and the 2000’s. Over the same period, study time declined by almost a half. This paper uses a 12-quarter panel of course evaluations from the University of California, San Diego to discern whether a link...

A growing number of today’s college students attend local 2-year community colleges. Many of these students will ultimately transfer to major universities in pursuit of the traditional Bachelors degree. The question of whether such transfer credits adequately prepare students for future...

In 2008 the faculty senate of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) decided to publish mean student evaluations of teaching online. The stated goal of the policy was to “provide useful information to students as they design their program of study.” Using...

This article argues that resource expansion can fail to improve actual student performance because it might cause educators to soften grading standards (i.e., induce grade inflation). Our theoretical model shows that, depending on schools’ and students’ reactions to resource changes, the...

Previous work on the relation between school inputs and students' educational attainment typically fails to account for the fact that schools can adjust their grading structure, even though such actions are likely to affect students' incentives. Our theoretical model shows that, depending on...

We consider a game in which schools compete to place graduates in two distinct ways: by investing in the quality of education, and by strategically designing grading policies. In equilib- rium, schools issue grades that do not perfectly reveal graduate abilities. This leads evaluators to have...