Paying for college is often a family affair, with both parents and students contributing. We study the effects of college on family finances using administrative data on the universe of federal aid applicants in California linked to credit records. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of how...
This paper documents several facts about graduate program graduation rates using administrative data covering public and nonprofit graduate students in Texas. Despite conventional wisdom that most graduate students complete their programs, only 58 percent of who started their program in 2004...
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt....
College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed--since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources,...
Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States, but little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and longrun financial wellbeing. We use variation induced by recent expansions in federal loan...
This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a students ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data on all public-school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third-grade academic rank,...
Texass Top 10 Percent rule raised college attendance, graduation, and earnings for students from underrepresented high schools who gained access to UT Austin but did not reduce these metrics for those who were crowded out. S elective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs:...
Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access...
Do nudge interventions that have generated positive impacts at a local level maintain efficacy when scaled state or nationwide? What specific mechanisms explain the positive impacts of promising smaller-scale nudges? We investigate, through two randomized controlled trials, the impact of a national...
We document two empirical phenomena. First, the observational wage returns to hours worked within occupation is small, and even negative in some specifications. Second, the wage return to average hours worked across occupations is large. We develop a conceptual framework that reconciles these facts,...
We estimate effects of the largest U.S. federal grant for college students using administrative data from Texas four-year public colleges and a discontinuity in grant generosity. Eligibility for additional grant aid significantly increases degree receipt and earnings beginning four years after entry...
