A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we estimate the earnings gains to for-profit college attendance using restricted-access data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). Using an individual fixed...

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we offer some of the first causal estimates of the earnings gains to for-profit colleges. We rely on restricted-use data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97)...

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few...

Did colonial policies in India deliver excessive returns to British investors? We answer this question using annual data on Indian securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We present new series on market capitalization, capital gains, dividend yields, and total returns of railway...

If land is titled and transferable, it can be used as collateral against which money can be borrowed. The resulting increase in access to credit is usually expected to foster economic growth. We study a policy in colonial India that made land less available as collateral for debt. Using a panel...

Using a unique dataset of US military officers enrolled in graduate programs at the Naval Postgraduate School, we find students enrolled in distance education programs are 19 percentage points less likely to graduate and have significantly lower GPAs than students enrolled in comparable...

We study the impact of the Deccan Agriculturists' Relief Act (DARA), a key legislation to protect debtors that was enacted in western colonial India. Using a panel dataset and a difference-in-difference estimation, we find a substantial decline in mortgage-backed credit after the passage of...

Identifying the effect of a ruler's religious identity on policy is challenging because religious identity rarely varies over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting quasi-random variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States. Using data from the 1911 census, we...

It is widely recognized that railways were one of the most important drivers of economic growth in the 19th and 20th century, but it is less recognized that railways had a different impact across countries. In this paper, we first estimate the growth impact of Indian railways, one of the largest...