This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age six and find that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls. There are no detectable impacts for boys. This pattern of results does not appear to be driven by heterogeneity in pre-removal characteristics, foster placements, or the type of schools attended after removal. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that development of abused and neglected girls is more responsive to home removal.

Boys are less likely than girls to enter college, a gap that is often attributed to a lack of non-cognitive skills such as motivation and self-discipline.We study how being classified as gifted -determined by having an IQ score of 116 or higher -affects college entry rates of disadvantaged children in a large urban school district.For boys with IQ's around the cutoff, gifted identification raises the college entry rate by 25-30 percentage points -enough to catch up with girls in the same IQ range.In contrast, we find small effects for girls.Looking at course-taking and grade outcomes in middle and high school, we find large effects of gifted status for boys that close most of the gaps with girls, but no detectable effects on standardized tests scores of either gender.Overall, we interpret the evidence as demonstrating that gifted services raise the non-cognitive skills of boys conditional on their cognitive skills, leading to gains in educational attainment.