We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

The boll weevil spread across the Southern United States from 1892 to 1922 having a devastating impact on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor–intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of attending school, and thus the pest increased school enrollment and...

We use a reform that was recently implemented in Italy to investigate the effects on academic achievement of more stringent requirements for the admission to the next grade at upper secondary school. We study how such effects are mediated by changes in family and school inputs, and in the...

We estimate the effect of school size on students' long-term outcomes such as high school completion, being out of the labor market, and earnings at the age of 30. We use rich register data on the entire population of Danish children attending grade 9 in the period 1986-2004. This allows us to...

In addition to the morbidity and mortality concerns of outdoor air pollution, studies have shown that air pollution also generates problems for children's cognitive performance and human capital formation. High concentrations of pollutants can affect children's learning process by exacerbating...

As of the early 2000s, the gap in college enrollment between children growing up in the highest income quartile and the lowest income quartile was over 50 percentage points (Bailey and Dynarski 2011). There is much debate in the literature about what role household income plays in producing this...

Standardized test scores and the labels associated with those scores provide students and their parents highly credible information about a student’s academic achievement. This information could cause students and their parents to change their beliefs regarding a student’s academic ability....

This paper investigates the enduring impacts of external assessments conducted at the culmination of primary education, primarily on the adult outcomes of immigrants residing in the United States. Using an epidemiological approach, we exploit variation in examination types within countries of...