This paper evaluates the first year of Harvard's Financial Aid Initiative, which increased aid and recruiting for students from low income backgrounds. Using rich data from the Census and administrative sources, we estimate family incomes for the vast major of plausible applicants from the U.S....

In September 1998, the Judicial Conference of the United States abandoned its latest attempt to regulate the timing of interviews and offers in the law clerk selection process. This paper surveys the further unraveling of the market since then, makes comparisons with other entry level...

Early application programs have turned the college admissions process into a highly strategic arena. It is widely believed, but seldom acknowledged by colleges, that early applicants are favored in admissions decisions. This report is a brief summary of a book that will be published by Harvard...

This paper solves for equilibria of sequential bid (or English) auctions with affiliated values when jump bidding strategies may be employed to intimidate one's opponents. In these equilibria, jump bids serve as correlating devices which select asymmetric bidding functions to be played...

We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the "CAPS" website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative about future stock prices. Indeed, a strategy of shorting stocks with a...

Total student loan debt rose to over $800 billion in June 2010, overtaking total credit card debt outstanding for the first time. By the time this article sees print, the continually updated Student Loan Debt Clock will show an accumulated total of roughly $1 trillion. Borrowing to finance...

Recent developments in computer networks have driven the cost of distributing information virtually to zero, creating extraordinary opportunities for sharing product evaluations. The authors present pricing and subsidy mechanisms that operate through a computerized market and induce the...

The authors study the relationship between asset prices and herd behavior, which occurs when traders follow the trend in past trades. When traders have private information on only a single dimension of uncertainty (the effect of a shock to the asset value), price adjustments prevent herd...