The increasing use of aptitude tests as part of the admissions processes at elite English universities potentially has significant implications for fair access to these institutions. I attempt to isolate the impact of the introduction of one such test on the proportion of successful applicants by school type (as a proxy for socioeconomic status) and by gender using a difference in differences a...

I present a revealed preference ranking of school quality. This is helpful to pin down between two or more schools the one that attracts high ability students at the lowest additional cost of quality. Available school rankings don’t capture the heterogenous effects that an increase in school quality has on the choices of students with different characteristics. To do so, I obtain the ranking by...

Who Performs Better under Time Pressure? Results from a Field Experiment We investigate whether and how time pressure affects performance. We conducted a field experiment in which students from an Italian University are proposed to choose between two exam schemes: a standard scheme without time pressure and an alternative scheme consisting of two written intermediate tests, one of which to be t...

Up or Out: Research Incentives and Career Prospects of Postdocs in Germany Academic careers in Germany have been under debate for a while. We conduct a survey among postdocs in Germany, to analyze the perceptions and attitudes of postdocs regarding their research incentives, their working conditions, and their career prospects. We conceptualize the career prospects of a postdoc in a life-cycle ...

We analyze whether funding bodies are biased against diverse teams, which have often been linked to the production of transformative research. We develop a general framework that compares the drivers of success in the ex-ante grant decision process to the drivers of success in ex-post performance. We use our framework to systematically analyze the decisions of one of the major public funding or...

Harry J. Holzer and Sandy Baum’s recent book, Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students, provides an excellent up-to-date review of higher education. My first summarizes its key themes: (i) who gains from college why, (ii) mismatch the need more structure, (iii) problems with remediation, (iv) financial barriers, (v) promise comprehensive support. I then critique book’...

Empirical researchers often combine multiple instrumental variables (IVs) for a single treatment using two-stage least squares (2SLS). When effects are heterogeneous, common justification including IVs is that the 2SLS estimand can be given causal interpretation as positively weighted average of local (LATEs). This requires well-known monotonicity condition. However, we show with more than one ...

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...

Since 1991 more than two dozen states have adopted merit-based student financial aid programs, intended at least in part to increase the stock of human capital by improving the knowledge and skills of the state’s workforce. At the same time, there has been growing concern that the U.S. is producing too few college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Usi...