Educational Achievement and the Allocation of School Resources The school resources – educational outcomes debate has focused almost exclusively on spending levels. We extend this by analysing the relationship between student achievement and schools’ budget allocation decisions using panel data. Per-pupil expenditure has only a modest relationship with improvement in students’ standardised test...

Can schools that boost student outcomes reproduce their success at new campuses? We study a policy reform allowed effective charter in Boston, Massachusetts to replicate school models locations. Estimates based on randomized admission lotteries show replication generate large achievement gains par with those produced by parent campuses. The average effectiveness of Boston’s middle sector increa...

I quantify the effects of alternative student loan policies on college enrollment, borrowing behavior, and default rates in a heterogeneous model of life-cycle earnings and human capital accumulation. I find that the combination of learning ability and initial stock of human capital drives the decision to enroll in college, while parental wealth has minimal effects on enrollment. Repayment flex...

In Germany, the streaming of students into an academic or nonacademic track at age 10 can be revised at later educational stages. To investigate the importance of such revisions, we use administrative data on the student population in one German state to measure the persistence of a randomly allocated disadvantage in the form of the school entry age’s impact on track attainment. Based on exogen...

This paper examines if students’ college outcomes are sensitive to access to college admissions tests. I construct a dataset of every test center location and district policy in the United States linked to the universe of individual testing records and a large sample of college enrollment records. I find evidence that SAT taking is responsive to the opening or closing of a testing center at a s...

We report an experiment in 3,000 villages that tested whether incentives improve aid efficacy. Villages received block grants for maternal and child health and education that incorporated relative performance incentives. Subdistricts were randomized into incentives, an otherwise identical program without incentives, or control. Incentives initially improved preventative health indicators, parti...

This paper proposes an explanation for the universal human desire for increasing consumption. It holds that it was moulded in evolutionary times by a mechanism known to biologists as sexual selection, whereby a certain trait observable consumption is used by members of one sex to signal their unobservable characteristics valuable to members of the opposite sex. It then goes on to show that the ...

Does access to credit explain the gap in schooling attainment between children from richer and poorer families? I present new evidence on this important question using two college tuition loans in Chile. Both programs offer loans to students who score above a threshold on the national college admission test, enabling a regression discontinuity design. I find that loan access implies an increase...

Here we demonstrate the implementation of a single-molecule force clamp adapted for use with an atomic force microscope. We show that under force-clamp conditions, an engineered titin protein elongates in steps because of the unfolding of its modules and that the waiting times to unfold are exponentially distributed. Force-clamp measurements directly measure the force dependence of the unfoldin...

The paper develops a model for the screening mechanism for higher education, within an adverse selection framework. Specifically it examines the effect of wage earned by high school graduates on higher education participation. The model pinpoints a positive relation between the “high school” wage and the number of candidates entered in higher education with positive influences on the quality of...