Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States,...

We provide evidence of a positive causal link between financial knowledge acquired through business education and returns on stock investments. Using exogenous variation generated by admission thresholds to university business programs in Sweden, we document that early investments in financial...

Using university admission cutoffs that generate exogenous variation in college-major choices, we provide causal evidence that enrollment in a business or economics program leads individuals to invest significantly more in the stock market, earn higher portfolio returns, and ultimately...