The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and the scarce empirical evidence on the matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the impacts of Brazil's Law of Quotas on the students' performance in the college entrance exam,…

In response to widening achievement gaps and increased demand for post-secondary education, local and federal governments across the US have enacted policies that have boosted high school graduation rates without an equivalent rise in student achievement, suggesting a decline in academic standards. To the extent that academic standards can shape…

Racial affirmative action policies are widespread in college admissions. Yet, evidence on their effects before college is limited. Using four data sets, we study a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reinstated affirmative action in three states. Using nationwide SAT data for difference-in-differences and synthetic control analyses, we separately…

School turnaround has emerged as a predominant strategy to improve chronically low-performing schools, although the approach remains controversial. This meta-analysis synthesizes results from 35 studies to examine the relationship between school turnaround and various student outcomes. We find that school turnaround is associated with improved…

Technical efficiency is the ability of a firm to produce its maximum output using a set of inputs or to minimise the use of its inputs to produce a certain level of output. When a firm is operating at its most efficient, operating costs can be minimised, profits maximised and competitiveness improved. This study investigates the role of a firm's…

Purpose: Every September, millions of students--elite human resources--enter higher education in China. This large-scale college-induced migration has substantial impacts on China's national and local labor markets. This study examines the migration pattern in college choice and admission among the Hui students in China. In doing so, we extend the…

Using newly available data from the Trajectories in Education and Careers Study, the first longitudinal study on a representative sample of high school students in Russia, we examined the importance of investments in human and cultural capital on students' mathematics and reading standardized examinations, as well as on the likelihood of…

The authors examined expectations for and commitment to career and family participation among American and Chinese business students using social learning theory. They found differences between Chinese and U.S. respondents on expectations regarding career and family as well as an interaction between gender, country (China vs. United States), and…

Purpose: English language skills have great influence on labors' earnings from the global perspective. To reveal the economic returns to English language ability in Chinese labor market, we investigate how the global English test certificate affects college graduates' wage. Design/Approach/Methods: We adopt the ordinary least squares (OLS) and…

To evaluate how Advanced Placement courses affect college-going, we randomly assigned the offer of enrollment into an AP science course to over 1,800 students in 23 schools that had not previously offered the course. We find no substantial AP course effects on students' plans to enroll in college or on their college entrance exam scores. Yet AP…

The impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas is estimated. It was found that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically…

We extend to the longitudinal setting a latent class approach that was recently introduced by Lanza, Coffman, and Xu to estimate the causal effect of a treatment. The proposed approach enables an evaluation of multiple treatment effects on subpopulations of individuals from a dynamic perspective, as it relies on a latent Markov (LM) model that is…

Though many studies explore arts participation at the P-12 level and attendance at the adult level, there remains little to no exploration on who attends arts events throughout college. Being an egalitarian period of life where on-campus arts programing remains either free or at a reduced cost, college may be one of the last areas to cultivate…

Chapter 2: The Role of Class Difficulty in College Grade Point Averages. Grade Point Averages (GPAs) are widely used as a measure of college students' ability. Low GPAs can remove a students from eligibility for scholarships, and even continued enrollment at a university. However, GPAs are determined not only by student ability but also by the…

Academic leaders in the 21st century are required to be both organizationally competent and intentionally collaborative with those they lead to be effective in a world of disruption, change, and complexity. Two current leadership constructs particularly relevant for meeting these needs are the focus of this study: "Authentic Leadership,"…