In this paper, we investigate sibling correlations in educational outcomes, which serve as a broad measure of the importance of family and community background. Making use of rich longitudinal survey and register data for Denmark, our main aim is to identify the parental background...

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences...

Disruptions in family life can take many forms, but all have the potential to impact student learning. With school administrative data matched to birth records, I estimate the effect of unexpected changes in the home environment, or family shocks, on achievement. Identification comes from...

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps - specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs - as a potential explanation for these...

This study aims to analyze the evolution of access to higher education in the cohort 18-24 years, which is considered the most adequate for this level of education. Initially, we question the use of this age group as a reference to measure the degree of access to this level of education in...

This paper is the first to estimate a causal effect of immigrant students’ reading performance on their math performance. To overcome endogeneity issues due to unobserved ability, we apply an IV approach exploiting variation in age-at-arrival and the linguistic distance between origin and...

Compulsory schooling increases average level of education in a country and provides other benefits, its effect on geographical distribution is, however, not obvious. We explore the effect of a sudden change in compulsory schooling in Turkey, that increased mandatory years of schooling from five...