This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students' major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...

This study investigates how exposure to an academic field influences students major choices. In particular, we analyze whether students who are inclined to study business change their intentions after being exposed to economics or law. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university. All...

To combat a growing obesity problem, Mexico imposed a nationwide tax on drinks with added sugar, popularly referred to as a "soda tax," effective January 2014. Since the tax took effect nationwide, there is no conventional control group that can be used as a baseline to estimate how the tax...

U.S.-born Mexican Americans suffer a large schooling deficit relative to other Americans, and standard data sources suggest that this deficit does not shrink between the 2nd and later generations. Standard data sources lack information on grandparents’ countries of birth, however, which...

Previous work has documented that speaking one's native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated with lower wages. In this study, we seek to estimate the causal effect of speaking with a distinctive regional accent, disentangling the effect of the accent from that of...

The paper considers theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of standards-based school reform. Our theoretical synthesis distinguishes between sorting and incentive effects of high standards, and spells out the potential tradeoffs and complementarities between enhancing efficiency and...

This paper raises the problem of how to define revealed probabilistic beliefs in the context of the capacity/Choquet Expected Utility model. At the center of the analysis is a decision-theoretically axiomatized definition of ""revealed unambiguous events."" The definition is shown to impose...

This paper exhibits a class of infinite-horizon economies with incomplete markets (GEI) for which the equilibrium can be explicitly derived. We show that if agents have preference orderings represented by expected discounted quadratic utilities and if their endowments are tradable, then the...

We analyze the reallocations of educational expenditures required to equalize opportunities, according to the theory of Roemer (1998). Using the NLSYM data set, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across men of different races, by using educational finance as the instrument,...