This paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long-run academic achievement in school. We use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients, such as the classification of Very Low Birth Weight (VLBW ), which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff. Using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from Chile and Norway, we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school. These gains are in the order of 0.15–0.22 standard deviations.

Abstract Many school districts with centralized school choice adopt strategy-proof assignment mechanisms to relieve applicants from needing to strategize based on beliefs about their own admissions chances. This article shows that beliefs about admissions chances shape choice outcomes even when the assignment mechanism is strategy-proof by influencing how applicants search for schools and that “smart matching platforms” that provide live feedback on admissions chances help applicants search more effectively. Motivated by a model in which applicants engage in costly search for schools and overoptimism can lead to undersearch, we use data from a large-scale survey of choice participants in Chile to show that learning about schools is hard, beliefs about admissions chances guide the decision to stop searching, and applicants systematically underestimate nonplacement risk. We use RCT and RD research designs to evaluate scaled live feedback policies in the Chilean and New Haven choice systems. Twenty-two percent of applicants submitting applications where risks of nonplacement are high respond to warnings by adding schools to their lists, reducing nonplacement risk by 58% and increasing test score value added at the schools where they enroll by 0.10 standard deviations. Reducing the burden of school choice requires not just strategy-proofness inside the centralized system but also choice supports for the strategic decisions that inevitably remain outside of it.

Abstract Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.