Women comprise less than a quarter of full professors in STEM departments in United States universities, yet women outnumber men at the assistant professor level, underscoring the imbalanced representation of women in the academic career pipeline. In this paper, we present the results of a...

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states (plus D.C.), we investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty. We find that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps. Math...

Weak labor markets typically lead young workers to invest in skills. High unemployment during COVID diverged from prior downturns: enrollment at community colleges dropped by 9.5 percent between 2019 and 2020, with the drop larger among men. COVID disruptions generated supply-side impacts on...

The pandemic has revived the longstanding debate about the effect of online versus face-to-face instruction on student achievement. The goal of this paper is to provide new evidence on the impact of online versus face-to-face instruction on student learning outcomes, using rich, transcript-level...

We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of cumulative Covid infection rates at over 1,100 US colleges and universities during the 2020-21 academic year. We propose a simple theoretical framework in which financially constrained educational institutions face a trade-off between...

Since the spring of 2021, nearly 700 colleges and universities in the U.S. have mandated that their students become vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. We leverage rich data on colleges' vaccination policies and semester start dates, along with a variety of county-level public health...

We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of cumulative COVID infection rates at over 1,100 US colleges and universities during the 2020-21 academic year. We propose a simple theoretical framework in which financially constrained educational institutions face a trade-off between...

We examine the role of information in the college matching behavior of low- and high-income students, exploiting a state automatic admissions policy that provides some students with perfect a priori certainty of college admissions. We find that admissions certainty encourages college-ready...