We provide experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial and 15-year longitudinal follow-up. For young women, receiving a scholarship for secondary school delays childbearing and marriage,...

We study the effect of incarceration on wages, self-employment, and taxes and transfers in North Carolina and Ohio using two quasi-experimental research designs: discontinuities in sentencing guidelines and random assignment to judges. Across both states, incarceration generates short-term drops...

We introduce a novel empirical decomposition of equity price growth rates in terms of equity holdings, based on market-clearing conditions. Although our sample holdings cover only an average of 5% of market capitalization, our reconstructed equity holdings account for, on average, 89% of the...

The competitive application process is the traditional path to gain access to selective public universities. There is little research on alternative pathways to gain access to selective public universities. In this manuscript, we use the fuzzy regression discontinuity design to study the impact...

There is a growing body of research examining the labor market returns to college major, motivated by the large returns to skill in the labor market. Prior research has focused almost exclusively on mean effects and has paid little attention to the role of earnings growth and variability. Using...

One of the most important decisions a student can make during the course of his or her college career is the choice of major. The field of study a student selects translates directly into the types of skills and knowledge he or she will obtain during college, and it can influence the type of...

We study two interventions in Texas that were designed to overcome multiple hurdles faced by low-income, high-ability college students. The Longhorn Opportunity Scholars (LOS) and Century Scholars (CS) programs recruited at specified low-income high schools, provided additional financial aid,...

There has been a resurgence in research that investigates the efficacy of early investments as a means of reducing gaps in academic performance. However, the strongest evidence for these effects comes from experimental evaluations of small, highly enriched programs. We add to this literature by...

This paper uses administrative data on schooling and earnings from Texas to estimate the effect of college quality on the distribution of earnings. We proxy college quality using the college sector from which students graduate and focus on identifying how graduating from UT-Austin, Texas A\&M or...

Laboratory experiments have established the existence of cognitive biases, but their explanatory power in real-world economic settings has been difficult to measure. We estimate the extent of a cognitive bias, confirmatory bias, among experts in a real-world environment. In the Associated Press...