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...

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....

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...

While a growing literature documents the short-term effects of public programs providing children with nutritious food, there is scarce evidence of the long-term effects of such programs. This paper studies the long-term consequences of access to nutritious food using the rollout of a free...

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...