Using administrative data from a large public university, we show that male students are 18.6 percent more likely than female to receive favorable grade changes made by instructors. Surveys of and instructors reveal regrade requests prevalent ask for regrades on the intensive margin. We corroborate gender differences in an incentivized controlled experiment: find males have higher willingness p...

We provide quasi-experimental estimates of the impact social media on mental health by leveraging a unique natural experiment: staggered introduction Facebook across US colleges. Our analysis couples data student around years Facebook’s expansion with generalized difference-in-differences empirical strategy. find that rollout at college had negative health. It also increased likelihood which st...

Using unique survey and administrative data from Canada, we document that parental support personal savings substantially reduce student loan repayment problems. Developing a model of borrowing repayment, show nonmonetary costs applying for income-based assistance are critical to understanding our findings. Furthermore, eliminating these may be inefficient. Empirically, expanding Canada’s Repay...

We construct a time series of college attendance patterns for the United States and document reversal: family background was better predictor before World War II, but academic ability afterward. model choice that explains this reversal. The model’s central mechanism is an exogenous surge leads colleges to be oversubscribed, institute selective admissions, raise their quality relative peers, as ...

We use the introduction of Texas Top Ten Percent rule to estimate effect access a selective college on graduation and earnings outcomes for two groups students. For highly ranked students at more disadvantaged high schools, who gained under policy, enrollment increased. Less advantaged tended lose access, shifted toward less-selective colleges but did not see declines in overall enrollment, gra...

We document that college completion rates have increased since the 1990s, after declining in 1970s and 1980s. find most of increase graduation can be explained by grade inflation other factors, such as changing student characteristics institutional resources, play little or no role. This is because GPA strongly predicts graduation, GPAs been rising 1990s. finding holds national survey data reco...

We study the causes of sustained participation in political movements. To identify persistent effect protest participation, we randomly indirectly incentivize Hong Kong university students into an antiauthoritarian protest. role social networks, randomize this treatment’s intensity across major-cohort cells. find that incentives to attend one within a movement increase subsequent attendance but...

Bibliometric Evaluation vs. Informed Peer Review: Evidence from Italy A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might at least partly replace informed peer...

IZA DP No. 11000 SEPTEMBER 2017 Gender Bias in Teaching Evaluations* This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected ...

This paper estimates the monetary return to quality in U.S. graduate education, controlling for cognitive ability and self-selection across award level, program quality, and field-of-study. In most program types, I cannot reject the hypothesis of no returns to either degree completion or program quality. Important exceptions include master’s programs in health science, where completion substant...