This paper uses data on roommates from two different selective institutions to investigate the effect of peers on first-year performance, with a specific focus on the underlying mechanism. We compare measures of academic ability across student sub-groups by race, income, and gender, and across...

The annual U.S. News and World Report Guide to America's Best Colleges is a much anticipated magazine among both high-ability prospective students and college and university administrators. In this paper we use a decade of Colgate University Admitted Student Questionnaire surveys to estimate the...

The Clean Air Act has set ambient air quality standards for the United States. Areas that violate these standards (usually large urban centers) are required to use cleaner- burning automotive fuels (oxygenated fuels) during the winter months in some cases, and year-round (reformulated gasoline)...

There is a gender imbalance in undergraduate economics departments with most departments educating a strong majority of young men. This imbalance has led many economists to ponder the question of why relatively few women choose to take courses and major in economics. Our hypothesis is that the...

In this article we investigate how the availability of public health care providers increases (complement) or decreases (substitute) the likelihood of having public or private health insurance. The probability of each of three insurance alternatives (uninsured, Medicaid, private insurance) is...

Address for correspondence : Associate Professor Kevin N. Rask, Department of Economics, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346 USA. The author is grateful to Jill Tiefenthaler, Norman Rask, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments, to Carolyn Edwards, Larry Hudson, and Robert Lowe for...