This paper investigates whether academic peer quality in colleges reduces social distance between castes in India by examining academic peer effects across castes. Using cutoff based admission rules and a unique data set linking admission data to college exit exam scores; I find that the better quality of high-caste students has a negative effect on the performance of the low-caste students. Th...

Concern over the distributional effects of policies which induce changes in peer group structure, or ‘associational redistributions’ (Durlauf, 1996c), motivates a substantial body of theoretical and empirical research in economics, sociology, psychology, and education. A growing collection of econometric methods for characterizing the effects of such policies are now available. This chapter sur...

This paper combines a search model and signaling game to analyze the interrelationship between labor market outcome and educational choices as well as relevant policy implications, featuring endogenous educational requirement for job application. It explains more than 60% of the unemployment rate difference between college and high school graduates. It predicts that higher unemployment benefit ...

Less than a handful of papers have used data on individuals to examine people’s decisions about which school to attend. This paper develops a nested logit model of the determinants of choice of a graduate business school. Data are drawn from a new longitudinal survey of registrants for the Graduate Management Admission Test. One finding is that elasticity of school choice with respect to tuitio...

Head Start is a comprehensive, early childhood development program designed to augment the human capital and health capital levels of disadvantaged children. Grossman’s (1972) health capital model suggests that early investments of this type should have lasting effects on health outcomes. This research evaluates the impact of Head Start on long-term health by comparing health outcome and behavi...

Using Norwegian data we find that married women’s education is positively associated with completed fertility, but this relationship becomes insignificant after controlling for husbands’ characteristics. Husbands’ education has a positive effect on women’s fertility. These findings suggest that the effect of education on married women’s fertility goes through assortative mating. For unmarried w...

This study examines the impact of fluctuations in entry-level labor market conditions on the graduate school enrollment decisions of newly minted undergraduate degree holders. Using repeated cross-section data for recently graduated science and engineering undergraduates from the National Survey of Recent College Graduates, and state-level unemployment rates to measure entry-level labor market ...

We investigate the effect of inequality on the political support for public education funding in a model of endogenous fertility and school choice. In contrast to recent literature we show that when household income heterogeneity is consistent with the skewness of empirical income distributions, inequality can drive education spending in opposite directions in poor and rich economies. A mean pr...

Rational Students and Resit Exams Resit exams – extra opportunities to do an exam in the same academic year – are widely prevalent in European higher education, but uncommon in the US. I present a simple theoretical model to compare rational student behavior in the case of only one exam opportunity versus the case of two exam opportunities. Numerical examples for a wide range of plausible param...

This paper provides the first analysis of the relationship between the language mix of Limited English Proficient (LEP) peers and student achievement, using detailed panel data from 2006 to 2012. Percent LEP has a negative association with mathematics and reading test scores, more so for non-LEP students than for LEP students. The overall language mix of LEP students has little if any discernab...