Governments around the world use grant and loan programs to ease the financial constraints that contribute to socioeconomic gaps in college completion. A growing body of research assesses the impact of grants; less is known about how loan programs affect persistence and degree completion. We use detailed administrative data from Chile to provide…

Teachers often deliver the same lesson multiple times in one day. In contrast to year-to-year teaching experience, it is unclear how this teaching repetition affects student outcomes. We examine the effects of teaching repetition in a higher education setting where students are randomly assigned to a university instructor's first, second, third,…

In this paper, I study heterogeneity in graduate students' responses to financial incentives. The incentive was given by a student aid reform in Norway that was intended to increase the proportion of students who graduate on time by offering a reduction of their student loan. Using a difference-in-difference strategy and detailed Norwegian…

Scams involving university degrees are flourishing in many emerging markets. Using a resume experiment in India, this paper studies the impact of "gray degrees," or potentially bought academic credentials from questionable universities, on callback rates to job applications. The experiment varied the type of degree (no, gray, and…

This paper explores factors affecting the choice of investment in specific human capital in the presence of significant inter-group and spatial inequalities. I use four years of admissions application data at an elite university in South Africa in conjunction with quarterly labor force data to trace the link between aptitude-adjusted expected…

This paper characterizes household spending in education using microdata from income and expenditure surveys for twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries and the United States. Bahamas, Chile, and Mexico have the highest household spending in education and Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay have the lowest. Tertiary education is the most important…