Disruptions in family life can take many forms, but all have the potential to impact student learning. With school administrative data matched to birth records, I estimate the effect of unexpected changes in the home environment, or family shocks, on achievement. Identification comes from...

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

How society invests in human capital is important for economic growth and social welfare. The paper reports from the first experiment designed to elicit people's preferences for how to prioritize educational resources, where 2,000 Americans trade off educational resources between quick and slow...

87 percent of Canadians who in 1990 had incomes in the lowest quintile, in 2009 had incomes that placed them in higher quintiles. Of those in the highest quintile, 36 percent had moved to lower ones. All Canadians have been getting richer, the poor more than the rich; the middle class has not...

The 2007-09 Great Recession has led to an unprecedented increase in public debt in many countries, triggering substantial fiscal adjustments. What are the distributional consequences of fiscal austerity measures? This is an important policy question. This paper analyzes the effects of fiscal...

In this paper the Signalling approach to the explanation of wage differentials is analyzed in a critical way. Departing from the classic Spence's model, the article shows how the introduction of inequalities in accessing to education leads to separating equilibria characterized by redistributive...

Can high-dosage tutoring help low-performing adolescents? We implement a randomized experiment to test a twofold intervention: A teacher training program customized for instructing 8th graders who perform poorly in mathematics and two 4-6 week periods of targeted math instruction for...

Can outside interventions foster socio-culturally diverse friendships? We executed a large field experiment that randomized the seating charts of 182 primary-school classrooms (N=2,996 students) for the duration of one semester. We found that being seated next to each other increased the...

Contact theory and conflict theory offer sharply conflicting predictions about the effects of interethnic exposure on prejudice. Contact theory predicts that close collaborative contact under conditions of equal status causes a reduction in interethnic prejudice. By contrast, conflict theory...

We study the relationship between locus of control (LoC) and human capital investment decisions in the adolescence, using PDS lasso to exploit high-dimensional data. While LoC is not significantly associated with graduation from high school once we use exogenous controls, it correlates strongly...