Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) pro­vides excep­tion­al­ly gen­er­ous sup­port to a col­lege pop­u­la­tion sim­i­lar to that served by a host of state aid pro­grams. In con­junc­tion with STBF, we ran­dom­ly assigned aid awards to thou­sands of Nebraska high school grad­u­ates from low-income, minor­i­ty, and first-gen­er­a­­tion col­lege house­holds. Randomly-assigned STBF awards boost […]

Analyzing Florida birth cer­tifi­cates matched to school records, we doc­u­ment that the female advan­tage in child­hood behav­ioral and aca­d­e­m­ic out­comes is dri­ven by gen­der gaps at the extremes of the out­come dis­tri­b­u­tion. Using uncon­di­tion­al quan­tile regres­sion, we inves­ti­gate whether fam­i­ly socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus (SES) dif­fer­en­tial­ly affects the low­er tail out­comes of boys. We find that the […]

School choice may lead to improve­ments in school pro­duc­tiv­i­ty if par­ents’ choic­es reward effec­tive schools and pun­ish inef­fec­tive ones. This mech­a­nism requires par­ents to choose schools based on causal effec­tive­ness rather than peer char­ac­ter­is­tics. We study rela­tion­ships among par­ent pref­er­ences, peer qual­i­ty, and causal effects on out­comes for appli­cants to New York City’s cen­tral­ized high […]