What is the impact of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics? Using student-level transcript data, we estimate the effect of speakers on future course-taking in models which use untreated lectures as control groups,...

The aim of this study is to link variation in energy cost misperceptions to variation in households' energy consumption. The focus is on two sorts of misperceptions: First, present biased discounting of future energy costs and second, biased energy price beliefs. By running an artefactual field...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date snapshot of the most important postsecondary education and labor market outcomes in the U.S. using two nationally representative sources of data: The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and The National Educational...

The migration of young Chinese scientists to undertake graduate studies in U.S. universities is arguably one of the most important recent episodes of skilled migration. Using a new data set covering around 16,000 Ph.D. graduates in 161 U.S. chemistry departments, we show that Chinese students...

Using detailed admissions data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC cases, we examine how racial preferences for under-represented minorities (URMs) affect their admissions to Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill. At Harvard, the admit rates for typical African American applicants are on...

Benchmarking is intended to help gauge where economies rank relative to others. However, historically educational benchmarking has often elected to use indicators based on their ease of availability, rather than a clear and defined link between inputs and learning outcomes. In this paper, we...

In Fall 2014, Wellesley College began mandating pass/fail grading for courses taken by first-year, first-semester students, although instructors continued to record letter grades. We identify the causal effect of the policy on course choice and performance, using a...

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the...

We exploit exogenous variation in college completion induced by draft-avoidance behavior during the Vietnam War to examine the impact of college completion on adult mortality. Our preferred estimates imply that increasing college completion rates from the level of the state with the lowest...