We estimate a dynamic learning model of the college dropout decision, taking advantage of unique expectations data to greatly reduce our reliance on assumptions that would otherwise be necessary for identification. We find that forty-five percent of the dropout that occurs in the first two...

Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show...

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major, relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes, and, provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors...

This paper provides new information about the interrelated issues of teacher turnover (both within and across school districts and inside and outside of teaching) and the importance of nonpecuniary school characteristics, such as race and poverty, using new administrative data on Georgia...

While substantial recent attention has been paid to understanding the determinants of educational outcomes, little is known about the causal impact of the most fundamental input in the education production function - students’ study effort. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This has forced researchers to adopt a variety of indirect approaches. This paper...

Motivated by the reality that the benefits of diversity on a college campus will be mitigated if interracial interactions are scarce or superficial, previous work has strived to document the amount of interracial friendship interaction and to examine whether policy can influence this amount. In...

We use unique data to examine how college students from low income families form expectations about academic ability and to examine the role that learning about ability and a variety of other factors play in the college drop-out decision. From the standpoint of satisfying a central implication...

This paper discusses the problems that are encountered when dynamic, discrete choice models are specified with continuous, serially correlated state variables. A variety of approximation methods that can deal with these problems is examined, and an empirical example that allows continuous...