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on Education |
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Issue of 2026–09–21
seventeen papers chosen by João Carlos Correia Leitão, Universidade da Beira Interior |
| By: | Mello, Ursula (Insper, São Paulo); Melo, Ana Paula (Howard University); Santos, Alei (FGV EAESP) |
| Abstract: | Admission policies can reshape educational pathways before college entry by changing opportunities and incentives to invest. We study these responses using Brazil’s 2012 Federal Quota Law, which expanded reserved seats for underrepresented students in elite public universities. Exploiting variation induced by pre-existing quota policies, we implement matched difference-in-differences and follow students through college completion. We find that targeted students increase high-school completion, exam participation, and college enrollment. In contrast, non-targeted students substitute toward private institutions rather than leave higher education and become more likely to complete college. Together, these responses reveal anticipatory adjustments and system-wide reallocation across higher education institutions. |
| Keywords: | affirmative action, college admissions, human capital investment, educational attainment, displacement and reallocation |
| JEL: | I23 I24 I28 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18880 |
| By: | A. Patrick Behrer; Joshua Goodman; J. Parker Goyer; R. Jisung Park |
| Abstract: | Nearly the entire world's population breathes air exceeding WHO pollution guidelines, but the extent to which that exposure impairs the accumulation of human capital is not well understood. We study this using longitudinal PSAT data on nearly 10 million U.S. high school students, comparing the same student's scores across attempts preceded by differing air quality and instrumenting for local PM2.5 with smoke from distant wildfires. A year of observed pollution exposure reduces learning by 0.04-0.06 standard deviations, or 14-19% of typical annual score growth. The damage comes almost entirely from moderate pollution days (8–12 μg/m3), below the EPA's historical standard, and from exposure during the school year rather than summer, pointing to instructional disruption as a mechanism. Effects are three times larger in disadvantaged schools and among Black and Hispanic students, who are harmed more by the same exposure. Exposure to air pollution widens achievement gaps. |
| JEL: | I2 I24 Q5 Q53 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35670 |
| By: | Goodman, Joshua (Boston University); Nitkin, Samuel (Boston University) |
| Abstract: | rivate tutoring chains like Kumon and Sylvan have expanded rapidly in recent decades. Combining data on business locations, household spending, and district test scores, we study who uses these centers and how they affect academic skills. Nearly half of tutoring users are from the top income decile, with Asian and White households five and two times as likely to purchase tutoring as Black and Hispanic households. A staggered differences-in-differences design shows the opening of a district’s first chain center raises district-wide math and reading scores by 0.02-0.03 standard deviations, at a much lower cost than public spending typically producing similar gains. Math effects are largest for White and Asian students, so that center entry widens racial achievement gaps, though less so in more racially integrated districts. These private investments help their users, deepen educational inequality, and shape outcomes by which state accountability systems and families judge schools. |
| Keywords: | tutoring center, test scores, achievement, educational inequality |
| JEL: | I21 I28 H52 J24 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18905 |
| By: | Lundborg, Petter (Lund University); Nieto Castro, Adrian (Lund University) |
| Abstract: | We examine how early exposure to STEM professionals in the local neighborhood shapes children's long run educational and labor market outcomes. To identify causal effects, we use Swedish register data and several sources of variation in exposure to STEM qualified neighbors measured at the 100 by 100 meter grid. Exposure during compulsory education raises children's math performance, and evidence points to social ties as the main channel. It also increases the presence of boys and girls in science programs in high school and university, but mainly boys are more likely to complete a STEM bachelor degree. This gender gap persists into adulthood: STEM employment and earnings rise predominantly for boys. The results show that high skill professionals can serve as community based informal role models and that neighbors can shape long run educational and labor market trajectories. |
| Keywords: | STEM, science, neighbors, role model, human capital, labor trajectory |
| JEL: | I2 J2 J3 O3 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18889 |
| By: | Stefano Carattini (Georgia State University); Pamela Giustinelli (University of Padova); Marcella Veronesi (University of Turin) |
| Abstract: | Knowledge gaps and biased beliefs concerning both climate change and climate policy represent major obstacles to the decarbonization process. Climate education may offer a scalable solution to address such obstacles. In the context of a national reform of the school curriculum in Italy, we implemented a nationwide field experiment, training thousands of secondary school teachers across thousands of schools using a staggered design. Our intervention, a comprehensive course on climate change and climate policy, goes beyond the light-touch interventions typical in the literature. Using extensive survey data, we examine how training affects teachers' knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and policy preferences and, in turn, those of students. Our study highlights important initial knowledge gaps and biased beliefs about climate change among teachers and students, and provides evidence that climate education can address them at scale. Following our intervention, teachers and students also reconsider their support for climate policies. |
| Keywords: | climate change, climate policies, field experiment, biased beliefs, public support, climate education, secondary education |
| JEL: | C93 D72 D83 Q54 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2026-008 |
| By: | Olivér Ujvárossy (ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies); Hubert János Kiss (ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies; Corvinus University of Budapest) |
| Abstract: | We study whether classroom gender composition is associated with adolescents' risk-taking and willingness to compete. Using lab-in-the-field data from 1, 108 students in 53 classes from nine Hungarian secondary schools, we relate incentivized measures of both outcomes to the share of girls in the class. School fixed effects compare students across classes within the same school, and we interpret these comparisons as conditional associations because class composition is not randomly assigned. Student-level regressions show robust gender gaps: girls are less risk-taking and less willing to compete than boys. Classroom gender composition, however, is not systematically associated with either outcome. Flexible specifications and analyses of boys and class-level gender gaps likewise reveal no consistent pattern. |
| Keywords: | Gender composition; Risk-taking; Willingness to compete; Classroom peers; Adolescents |
| JEL: | C80 C90 D91 I21 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2612 |
| By: | Mahreen Khan; Iman Sen |
| Abstract: | Soft skills are widely believed to matter for labor market success, but two questions remain central to their use in active labor-market policy: are they malleable beyond childhood, and can training in these skills improve employment outcomes? To address these, we evaluate CareerX, a one-month soft-skills and career-readiness program for university students in Bangladesh. Across 15 cohorts, 1, 794 applicants were randomly assigned to an offer of training or a control group. One to two months after, training improves employment and paid employment by 7.3% and 6.7% in the treatment group. One year later, the estimated effect is similar in magnitude but less precisely estimated. An index of self-reported soft skills is 0.10 SD higher shortly after the program and remains higher, by 0.13 SD, one year later with larger gains in intrapersonal than interpersonal skills. Other measures such as CV quality, professional references and job-search planning and effort do not change detectably, a pattern consistent with improvements in soft skills contributing to the observed employment effects. The program is delivered at low marginal cost through group sessions and hybrid instruction at approximately USD 117 per additional attendee employed. Our results indicate that soft skills remain malleable at the point of labor market entry and that short programs can shift early employment outcomes at a cost well below comparable interventions. |
| Keywords: | youth employment, labor market entry, soft skills, RCT |
| JEL: | J24 M53 O15 I26 J08 C93 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:csa:wpaper:2026-05 |
| By: | Hidehiko Ichimura (Department of Economics, The University of Arizona and Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo); Yasuyuki Sawada (Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo); Yutaro Takayasu (Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University); Mari Tanaka (Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo and Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University) |
| Abstract: | When societies transition from hereditary to meritocratic systems, to what extent does educational expansion broaden access to elite positions and change inherited patterns of occupational sorting? We study Japan after the Meiji Restoration, which abolished samurai hereditary privileges in public-sector positions and modernized education. Exploiting cohort-specific discontinuities in access to secondary schooling created by the expansion of public secondary schools, we find that greater access increased elite attainment among both samurai and commoner families, but most additional elites entered sectors historically associated with their family background. Many had non-elite fathers, indicating greater upward intergenerational mobility into elite status. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tky:fseres:2026cf1280 |
| By: | Anjali Adukia; Matthew Bonci; Paula Dastres Gallardo; Emileigh Harrison; Jake Nicoll; Teodora Szasz |
| Abstract: | Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions described in text on the same page. Nearly half of pages show zero overlap between the emotions described in text and those shown in images. This pattern persists across time, contexts, and identities. Household purchases and library inventories suggest content may be endogenously shaped by consumer demand favoring "positive" cover imagery, implying market forces narrow the emotional landscape children encounter. |
| Keywords: | emotions, culture, content analysis, education policy, curriculum, artificial intelligence tools, computational social science, natural language processing, large language models, computer vision |
| JEL: | I20 I21 I24 L82 Z11 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12983 |
| By: | Benjamin W. Arold; Afonso Alves Monteiro; Constantine Yannelis |
| Abstract: | This paper studies whether school prayer and Bible reading affect adult beliefs and behavior. We exploit the U.S. Supreme Court’s early-1960s school-prayer decisions, which removed these practices only from states where they were still legal. Linking this state-by-cohort variation to adult outcomes in the General Social Survey, we estimate the long-run effects of removing school prayer on religiosity, family formation, labor market outcomes, gender attitudes, and social views. The abolition of school prayer lowers adult religiosity; reduces marriage and fertility; increases employment; and shifts gender and selected social attitudes in a less traditional direction. The employment effect is driven by women, and may operate partly through decreased full-time homemaking and less traditional gender roles. A decomposition indicates that school prayer bans explain more than half the decline in American religious attendance, and roughly one quarter of the decline in fertility and rise in female labor force participation. The findings show that even brief daily devotional practices in childhood can shape adult beliefs, family life, and economic behavior. |
| Keywords: | school prayer, religious education, religiosity, childhood socialization, family formation, female labor supply |
| JEL: | Z12 I21 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12979 |
| By: | Arold, B. W.; Monteiro, A. A.; Yannelis, C. |
| Abstract: | This paper studies whether school prayer and Bible reading affect adult beliefs and behavior. We exploit the U.S. Supreme Court’s early-1960s school-prayer decisions, which removed these practices only from states where they were still legal. Linking this state-by-cohort variation to adult outcomes in the General Social Survey, we estimate the long-run effects of removing school prayer on religiosity, family formation, labor-market outcomes, gender attitudes, and social views. The abolition of school prayer lowers adult religiosity; reduces marriage and fertility; increases employment; and shifts gender and selected social attitudes in a less traditional direction. The employment effect is driven by women, and may operate partly through decreased full-time homemaking and less traditional gender roles. A decomposition indicates that school prayer bans explain more than half the decline in American religious attendance, and roughly one quarter of the decline in fertility and rise in female labor force participation. The findings show that even brief daily devotional practices in childhood can shape adult beliefs, family life, and economic behavior. |
| Keywords: | School Prayer, Religious Education, Religiosity, Childhood Socialization, Family Formation, Female Labor Supply |
| JEL: | Z12 I21 J12 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–08–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cam:camdae:2673 |
| By: | Gachet, Nicholas |
| Abstract: | Stunting remains a major development challenge in many countries, including Ecuador. In this paper, I examine whether agrarian reform policies implemented during the 1960s and 1970s help explain long-run patterns of child stunting. The Ecuadorian reform relied on two distinct land allocation strategies: Public land transfers (PLT), designed to promote frontier settlement, and expropriation, aimed at redistributing land from large estates. Combining household survey data with historical maps and administrative records, I estimate the longrun relationship between these policies and child stunting by exploiting historical variation in land allocation across parishes. I find that areas exposed to PLT exhibit significantly lower rates of child stunting, while expropriation shows no robust association. Across specifications, PLT exposure is associated with stunting rates that are 3-17 percent lower relative to the mean. Cohort evidence further indicates that the relationship is stronger for mothers plausibly exposed to PLT during early childhood. Consistent with this pattern, mothers from more exposed PLT cohorts attained higher levels of education, suggesting that maternal human capital may be one channel linking frontier settlement policies to lower child stunting. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:343612 |
| By: | Xu, Danchen |
| Abstract: | Chinese universities have launched a wave of “AI+X” programs that train students in professional domains—architecture, journalism, accounting, teaching—to use generative AI tools, often before any consensus exists that AI-assisted learning improves educational outcomes. Empirical research to date finds no reliable improvement in grades, documents cognitive offloading, and leaves long-term learning effects unmeasured. This paper asks whether that disconnect between institutional acceleration and empirical uncertainty surfaces in discourse: do official and public articulations of AI’s role in education differ in epistemic certainty, and is any such gap innate or emergent? We construct two corpora spanning 2020–2026—official discourse (policy documents and official-media posts, n = 691) and public discourse (Weibo, n = 11, 345)—and measure four dimensions of epistemic stance (certainty markers, presupposition, hedging, and tolerance of uncertainty) using a hybrid design that pairs a transparent dictionary with LLM zero-shot coding, cross-validated at a mean Cohen's κ of .926. Three findings stand out. First, before ChatGPT the two corpora were epistemically indistinguishable, replicating Zeng, Chan, and Schäfer’s (2020) “striking similarity”; the gap emerged only after 2023. Second, the gap is not unidirectional: official discourse presupposes AI’s value more (D2 = 82.8% vs. 77.2%; policy documents 90.7%) yet hedges and acknowledges uncertainty significantly more than the public does (D3 and D4 reversed)—a pattern we term institutional hedging. Third, public epistemic stance is bimodal (absolute assertion or absolute doubt), whereas official discourse is layered across premise and expression. Time-series and difference-in-differences analyses locate two shocks—ChatGPT (2023) broke the stance layer (public D2 fell from 82% to 52%), and DeepSeek-R1 (2025) deepened the expression layer (D3 reached its series maximum)—suggesting the public underwent an epistemic learning process, first learning to doubt and then to qualify. We contribute a measurable, multidimensional discourse variable for the certainty gap and a hybrid coding template for large-scale epistemic-stance annotation. |
| Date: | 2026–09–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:upmt3_v1 |
| By: | Zecharias Anteneh; Adriana Castelli; Peter Sivey; Andrew Street; Jinglin Wen; Joy Adamson |
| Abstract: | Whether organisational separation of elective and emergency care improves physician productivity remains an open question. Most existing evidence relies on cross-sectional comparisons or volume-based outcomes that cannot isolate efficiency gains from input expansion or provider selection. In contrast, this paper exploits the staggered rollout of NHS England's surgical hub programme, a set of dedicated ring-fenced elective facilities introduced as part of its Elective Recovery Plan, to provide causal estimates of the effect of elective-emergency separation on physician productivity. Using this rollout to implement a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences design, we estimate the impact of hub adoption on physician productivity measured as cost-weighted elective output per unit of salary-weighted physician input. We find that hub adoption increases physician productivity by 14.5% relative to the no-hub counterfactual, accompanied by a 10-day (7.6%) reduction in average patient waiting times. The size of these gains depends on how completely elective care is insulated from emergency pathways. Standalone hubs situated on dedicated elective-only sites achieve relatively larger productivity gains than integrated hubs located within main acute hospital sites. Moreover, operating multiple hubs yields gains more than double the overall average, whereas a single hub shows no statistically significant effect. For health systems seeking to raise physician productivity and address elective backlogs, these findings suggest that how separation is implemented, not simply whether it is adopted, shapes the productivity gains it delivers. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.10380 |
| By: | Azami Idrissi, Abdelkarim; Fanghella, Valeria; Gonzalez-Fernandez, Pedro; Hauser, Karl |
| Abstract: | Li and Camerer (2022) examine whether attention automatically captured by visual features can influence economic decisions. In their first experiment, they find that visual salience affects people's choices between items, leading to systematic mistakes even when salience is unrelated to the items' actual value. First, we successfully computationally reproduce the main claims of the experiment, but uncover one minor coding error, which has no effect on the studies' main results. Second, using a larger, representative US sample (N = 418) we replicate both the significance and direction of the main estimates, finding that salience had an even stronger effect on economic choices. Furthermore, these replicated results withstand our robustness test. |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:321 |
| By: | Grace E. Venechuk; Jason Paul Bonham (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany) |
| Abstract: | The macrolevel relationship between increases in women’s education, family SES, and declines in fertility is well-established. However, region-specific studies (e.g., Sub-Saharan Africa) often highlight exceptions to this trend. We add to the literature by examining this relationship within the historical context of Utah. Utah is an outlier in many ways—it has historically been homogenous with regards to religion, had strong schooling systems, and had higher than average fertility. In this context, we examine whether 1) husband’s employment is associated with wife’s education levels, 2) wife’s education levels are associated with age at first birth and total births, and 3) the relationship between the interaction of husband’s employment, wife’s education and fertility outcomes. We find a negative relationship between wife’s education and fertility—however, we also find that, among self-employed husbands, each additional year of wife’s schooling is associated with an increase in total number of children. |
| Keywords: | Utah, completed fertility, education of women, fertility, gender, occupational choice |
| JEL: | J1 Z0 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2026-038 |
| By: | Andrea Weber; David Card; Wolfgang Dauth; Wolfgang Frimmel; Julia Schmieder; Rudolf Winter-Ebmer |
| Abstract: | How big are the gains to international migration? How do they vary across mi- grants? We study these questions using linked administrative data for Austria and Germany, focusing on migrants who were steadily employed 2-4 years be- fore their move and using their previous co-workers as a comparison group for a difference-in-differences design. We combine data from the origin and desti- nation countries for 5 years after the move, allowing us to assess the gains for those who remain in the destination and those who return. On average, mi- grants from Austria to Germany experience an immediate and persistent rise of around 13% in their daily wage relative to their matched co-workers, while migrants from Germany to Austria gain about 4%. The higher returns for Aus- trians are mainly driven by higher average wages in Germany, rather than by differential selection of migrants. Consistent with a dynamic learning model, the returns to migration are largest for migrants who remain in the destination country, smaller for those who return after 1-4 years, and zero or even slightly negative for those who return in less than a year. They are also larger for mi- grants who follow established cross-border networks between workplaces. To help interpret our findings we conduct a parallel analysis of domestic migrants who move to a larger city (Vienna or one of the 5 largest cities in Germany). “Big city†movers experience gains in wages of about 5% for Austrians and 10% for Germans. Again the gains are largest for those who remain in the des- tination city, with smaller effects for those who move on. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-07 |