A stepping stone arises in risky environments with learning and transferrable human capital. An example is the role played by academic two-year colleges in post-secondary education: Students, as they learn about the uncertain educational outcomes, can drop out or transfer up to harder and more...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...

China experienced a near 5-fold increase in annual Higher Education (HE) enrolment in the decade starting in 1999. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we show that the expansion has exacerbated the large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou...

China experienced a near 5-fold increase in annual Higher Education (HE) enrolment in the decade starting in 1999. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we show that the Great HE Expansion has exacerbated a large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou...

We apply the unordered monotonicity setting of Heckman and Pinto (2018) to estimate the distribution of response types and the counterfactual outcomes associated with the choice of a STEM or non-STEM college. Instrumental variation is induced by the proximity to universities offering STEM and/or...