Does borrowing at 400% APR do more harm than good? The U.S. Department of Defense thinks so and successfully lobbied for a 36% APR cap on loans to servicemen. But existing evidence on how access to high-interest debt affects borrowers is inconclusive. We estimate effects of payday loan access on enlisted personnel using exogenous variation in Air Force rules assigning personnel to bases across the United States, and within-state variation in lending laws over time. Airmen job performance and retention declines with payday loan access, and severely poor readiness increases. These effects are strongest among relatively inexperienced and financially unsophisticated airmen.

We take cohorts of entering freshmen at the United States Air Force Academy and assign half to peer groups designed to maximize the academic performance of the lowest ability students. Our assignment algorithm uses nonlinear peer effects estimates from the historical pre-treatment data, in which students were randomly assigned to peer groups. We find a negative and significant treatment effect for the students we intended to help. We provide evidence that within our “optimally” designed peer groups, students avoided the peers with whom we intended them to interact and instead formed more homogeneous subgroups. These results illustrate how policies that manipulate peer groups for a desired social outcome can be confounded by changes in the endogenous patterns of social interactions within the group.

We estimate peer effects in college achievement using a data set in which individuals are exogenously assigned to peer groups of about 30 students with whom they are required to spend the majority of their time interacting. This feature enables us to estimate peer effects that are more comparable to changing the entire cohort of peers. Using this broad peer group, we measure academic peer effects of much larger magnitude than found in previous studies. The effects persist at a diminished rate into follow-on years, and we find evidence of nonlinearities in the magnitude of the effects across student academic ability. (c) 2009 by The University of Chicago.

We study how author connections influence paper outcomes at the Journal of Human Resources. Authors who attended the same PhD program, worked with, affiliate with the same National Bureau of Economic Research program(s), or are closely linked via coauthorship networks as the handling editor are more likely to avoid a desk rejection. Reviewer recommendations are similarly influenced by PhD and employment matches. Matching on signals of ability—such as top five publishing, attending a high-ranked PhD program, or working in a high-ranked department—also impact peer review decisions. We find some evidence that published papers with greater connectivity subsequently receive fewer citations.

In primary and secondary education, measures of teacher quality are often based on contemporaneous student performance on standardized achievement tests. In the postsecondary environment, scores on student evaluations of professors are typically used to measure teaching quality. We possess unique data that allow us to measure relative student performance in mandatory follow‐on classes. We compare metrics that capture these three different notions of instructional quality and present evidence that professors who excel at promoting contemporaneous student achievement teach in ways that improve their student evaluations but harm the follow‐on achievement of their students in more advanced classes.

A large and growing literature has documented the importance of peer effects in education. However, there is relatively little evidence on the long-run educational and labor market consequences of childhood peers. We examine this question by linking administrative data on elementary school students to subsequent test scores, college attendance and completion, and earnings. To distinguish the effect of peers from confounding factors, we exploit the population variation in the proportion of children from families linked to domestic violence, who have been shown to disrupt contemporaneous behavior and learning. Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 24 to 28 by 3 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence explains 5 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that each year of exposure to a disruptive peer reduces the present discounted value of classmates’ future earnings by $80,000. (JEL I21, I26, J13, J24, J31)

Why aren't there more women in science? This paper begins to shed light on this question by exploiting data from the U.S. Air Force Academy, where students are randomly assigned to professors for a wide variety of mandatory standardized courses.We focus on the role of professor gender. Our results suggest that although professor gender has little impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students' performance in math and science classes, and high-performing female students' likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and graduating with a STEM degree. The estimates are largest for students whose SAT math scores are in the top 5% of the national distribution. The gender gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when high-performing female students are assigned to female professors in mandatory introductory math and science coursework.

We use unique data from journal submissions to identify and unpack publication bias and p-hacking. We find initial submissions display significant bunching, suggesting the distribution among published statistics cannot be fully attributed to a publication bias in peer review. Desk-rejected manuscripts display greater heaping than those sent for review; i.e., marginally significant results are more likely to be desk rejected. Reviewer recommendations, in contrast, are positively associated with statistical significance. Overall, the peer review process has little effect on the distribution of test statistics. Lastly, we track rejected papers and present evidence that the prevalence of publication biases is perhaps not as prominent as feared. (JEL A11, A14, C13, L82)