Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper...

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically...

High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general...

The decisions of judges, lenders, journal editors, and other gatekeepers often lead to disparities in outcomes across affected groups. An important question is whether, and to what extent, these group-level disparities are driven by relevant differences in underlying individual characteristics,...

We develop theory and a tightly-linked field experiment to explore the supply side implications of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our natural field experiment, in which we created our own firm and hired actual workers, generates a rich data set on worker behavior and responses to both...

We leverage a field experiment across three distinct school districts to identify key pieces of a structural model of adolescent human capital production. Our focus is inspired by the contemporary psychology of education literature, which expresses learning as a function of the ratio of the time...

Pre-College human capital investment occurs within a competitive environment and depends on market incentives created by Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions. These policies affect mechanisms for rank-order allocation of college seats, and alter the relative competition between blacks...

In this paper, we provide a suite of tools for empirical market design, including optimal nonlinear pricing in intensive-margin consumer demand, as well as a broad class of related adverse-selection models. Despite significant data limitations, we are able to derive informative bounds on demand...