Despite the fact that the average American student is absent more than two weeks out of every school year, most research on the effect of instructional time has focused not on attendance but on the length of the school day or year. Student and school fixed effects models using Massachusetts...

The relatively low degree completion rate of U.S. college students has prompted debate over the extent to which the problem is attributable to the students or to their choice of colleges. Estimating the impact of initial college choice is confounded by the non-random nature of college selection....

Low college enrollment rates among low-income students may stem from a combination of credit constraints, low academic skill, and low-quality schools. Recent Massachusetts data allow the first use of school district fixed effects in the analysis of credit constraints, leading to four findings....

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) may affect a child?s educational outcomes through a number of pathways, one of which is the child?s health. This essay asks two questions: What evidence exists about the effect of parental SES on child health? And, what evidence exists about the effect of...

Low college enrollment rates among low-income students may stem from a combination of credit constraints, low academic skill, and low-quality schools. Recent Massachusetts data allow the ?rst use of school district ?xed effects in the analysis of credit constraints, leading to four ?ndings....

Left- and right-handed individuals have different brain structures, particularly in relation to language processing. Using five data sets from the US and UK, I show that poor infant health increases the likelihood of a child being left-handed. I argue that handedness can thus be used to explore...

Most states now fund merit-based ?nancial aid programs, the effects of which depend on how strongly students react to changes in college costs. I estimate such reactions using quasiexperimental aspects of a recent Massachusetts merit scholarship program intended to attract talented students to...

Recent proposals to address housing market troubles through principal modification could increase the cost of credit in the mortgage market. We explore this possibility using historical variation in federal judicial rulings regarding whether Chapter 13 bankruptcy filers could reduce the...

The increasing prevalence of private tutoring has received minimal scholarly attention in the United States. We use over 25 years of geocoded data on the universe of U.S. private tutoring centers to estimate the size and growth of this industry and to identify predictors of tutoring center...