Increasingly, grade retention is viewed as an important alternative to social promotion, yet evidence to date is unable to disentangle how the effect of grade retention varies by abilities and over time. The key challenge is differential selection of students into retention across grades and by...

This paper develops a new approach to identifying peer achievement spillovers in the context of an equilibrium model of student effort choices. By focusing on the effect of contemporaneous peer achievement, this framework integrates previously unexplored types of heterogeneity in peer spillovers...

I use economic theory and estimates of a semiparametrically identified structural model to analyze the role played by credit constraints, uncertainty and preferences in explaining college attendance. A methodology for inferring information available to the agent from individual choices is...

This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing cross section variability of earnings into components that are forecastable at the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity) and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variability in returns to schooling is...