This paper provides evidence for why individuals join unions instead of free riding. I model membership as legal insurance. To test the model, I use the incidence of news stories concerning allegations against teachers in the United Kingdom as a plausibly exogenous shock to demand for such insurance. I find that for every five stories occurring in a region, teachers are 2.2 percentage points more likely to be members in the subsequent year. These effects are larger when teachers share characteristics with the news story and can explain 45% of the growth in teacher union membership between 1992 and 2010.

We estimate the effect of an unexpected institutional financial aid (IFA) award on student outcomes using administrative data collected from nine universities, exploiting variation in IFA schedules within and across university-entry cohorts. Each £1,000 of IFA during the first year of college increases the chances of completing that year by 1.4 percentage points, improves test scores by 0.059 standard deviations, and increases the chances of graduating with a good degree by 3.4 percentage points. We find that high-ability and low-income students benefit the most and calculate outcome-maximizing and cost-minimizing IFA schedules for each university.

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students’ prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.

This paper examines inequalities in the match between student and degree quality using linked administrative data from schools, universities, and tax authorities. We analyze two measures of match at the university subject level: undergraduate enrollment qualifications and graduate earnings. We find for both that disadvantaged students match to lower-quality degrees across the entire distribution of achievement in a setting with uniform fees and a generous financial aid system. While there are negligible gender gaps in academic match, high-attaining women systematically undermatch in terms of expected earnings, driven by subject choice. These inequalities in match are largest among the most undermatched.

How do global firms manage conflicting constituencies in complex markets? The Big 4 accounting firms have expanded their size and scope to the extent that they need to relate to different constituencies simultaneously, sometimes on controversial issues. This is particularly relevant given their engagement in aggressive tax planning services alongside their traditional professional obligations, as this generates a conflict between discretion offered to “offshore” clients and accountability offered to other stakeholders. This requires strategic duplicity—sending differentiated signals to different stakeholders. We suggest that firms use organizational partitioning across legal structures and geographies to enable strategic duplicity. We test this by collecting a unique data set on the Big 4's ownership structures and staff numbers across all locations, showing that their organizations are heavily segmented. We show that the Big 4 use this geographical and legal differentiation to send contrasting signals to constituents about their organizations, engaging in a type of strategic duplicity that we term transparency arbitrage, in which “onshore” stakeholders receive a signal of transparency and “offshore” stakeholders receive a signal of discretion. This duality enables them to engage in controversial issues with conflicting stakeholders.

This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment, class rank. What are the long-run effects of a student's 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, conditional on achievement and classroom fixed effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to take AP classes, graduate from high school, enroll in and graduate from college, and ultimately have higher earnings nineteen years later. We also discuss the necessary assumptions for the identification of rank effects and propose new solutions to identification challenges. The paper concludes by exploring the trade-off between higher-quality schools and higher rank in the presence of these rank-based peer effects.