The existence of teacher complementarities across grades can have important implications for the efficient assignment of students to teachers and for the evaluation of teachers using standard value-added models (VAMs). In this paper, I extend the basic VAM to allow for interactive effects between teachers. Using data from North Carolina’s primary schools, I find that teacher complementarities within schools are extremely small. This finding suggests that there is little to gain by assigning students to particular teacher sequences. Moreover, measures of teacher effectiveness generated from a typical VAM are not likely to be biased by interactions with past teacher inputs.

College graduates do not always pursue careers related to their major. Science majors working in jobs unrelated to their field of study earn approximately 30% lower wages than those working in related jobs. We develop a structural model of major choice and labor market outcomes that allows for skill uncertainty and differential accumulation of human capital across major. Our findings confirm that the average return to obtaining a science degree and working in a related job remains close to 30%. We also find that individuals are uncertain about their future productivity at the time of the college major decision.

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 1999, we show that parental beliefs about a child’s cognitive skill relative to children of the same age are distorted by a child’s cognitive skill relative to children in the same school. Parents of children attending schools with low (high) average skills tend to believe their child is higher (lower) in the overall skill distribution than they actually are. Teacher evaluations of child skill also exhibit local distortions, providing a channel through which parental biases might arise. Finally, we relate parental beliefs and investment, providing insight on how local distortions may impact the skill distribution.

We use public documents from the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University lawsuit to examine admissions preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). More than 43% of white admits are ALDC; the share for African American, Asian American, and Hispanics is less than 16%. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.

We estimate a model where workers are heterogeneous both in their own productivity and in their ability to facilitate the productivity of others. We use data from professional basketball to measure the importance of peers in productivity because we have clear measures of output and members of a worker’s group change on a regular basis. Our empirical results highlight that productivity spillovers play an important role in team production. Despite this, we find that worker compensation is largely determined by own productivity with little weight given to productivity spillovers.