I study how transitory increases in the opportunity cost of schooling affect dropout rates and long-run outcomes. Exploiting a tax-free year in Iceland and comparing teenagers around compulsory schooling age, I document increased dropout rates and a permanent loss in educational attainment for...

Rational individuals who obtain a premium by passing an imprecise test change their choice of costly competence when the pass threshold varies. At given premium that reaction prevents variation of the failure rate completely if the marginal cost of competence is constant, only partially if it is...

Analogies can simplify complex new material by relating it to ideas students already know. Making cross-disciplinary connections also makes the material more engaging, accessible and memorable. In this study, we perform a controlled empirical test to examine whether providing cross-discipline...

We present direct evidence on the link between children's patience and educational-track choices years later. Combining an incentivized patience measure of 493 primary-school children with their high-school track choices taken at least three years later at the end of middle school, we find that...

Reduced inequality in human capital may reduce appropriation from the rich. They may therefore favor policies such as income transfers and mandatory schooling which equalize human capital. Comparing several such policies, we find that mandatory schooling leads to higher incomes for both the rich...

Risk averse investors have to be compensated in higher expected returns when facing investments with higher risk. Education is an important investment therefore we use the results for 16 countries to test the positive relationship between return to education and the risk involved in this...

This paper analyzes optimal grading in a world that focuses on top grades. Students choose an effort level, their performance is graded, and their grade correlates with their future income. Ex-ante, the policy maker chooses the optimal coarseness of the grading scale to maximize student welfare....

The identification problems of general peer effect models have been studied in depth. But cognitive achievement studies suffer two additional sources of bias that arise because the behavioral variable - student effort - is unobserved. This paper studies both sources of bias and analyzes the...

This paper derives optimal income tax and human capital policies in a dynamic life cycle model of labor supply and risky human capital formation. The wage is a function of both stochastic, persistent, and exogenous "ability" and endogenous human capital. Human capital is acquired throughout life...

How should the government redistribute current income in an economic environment where more education by private agents crowds out physical capital, causes an excessive increase in the rate of return to physical capital relative to human capital, and lowers economic growth? Should the government...