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 […]

The race between edu­ca­tion and tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides a canon­i­cal frame­work that does an excel­lent job of explain­ing US wage struc­ture changes across the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The frame­work involves sec­u­lar increas­es in the demand for more-edu­­cat­ed work­ers from skill-biased tech­no­log­i­cal change, com­bined with vari­a­tions in the sup­ply of skills from changes in edu­ca­tion­al access. We expand […]