Research

Field of study is one of the largest contributors to the gender gap in earnings. A change in a school’s gender composition could affect students by changing what they learn, what they choose to study, or both. We study these effects using the conversion of girls’ schools to coeducation in Colombia between 2009 and 2023. Using linked administrative records and a matched event study design that follows each school’s students from the year before the switch, we find no effects on test scores or college entry rates, but significant effects on the choice of college major. Girls who had five years of secondary school left when their school began admitting boys are three percentage points, or 14 percent, less likely to enter STEM, and more likely to enter humanities, arts, and other non-STEM fields. We find suggestive evidence of lower formal employment and earnings. The shift appears even among girls whose own grade never mixed. These results suggest that coeducation changes what girls choose to study and that the school as a whole, not only the classroom, shapes these choices.

Altering classroom environments and leveraging peer networks show promise as some of the most cost-effective interventions targeting inputs in the education production function. Yet, the extent to which findings from prior small-scale studies generalize to typical education systems remains unclear. We evaluate this question through a peer tutoring intervention in government primary schools in Bhagalpur, Bihar, conducted with minimal external support and embedded within the noisy infrastructure characteristic of developing-country settings. The program involved 14,077 students in grades 3–5 across 176 schools, where high-performing students led daily small-group remedial math sessions. We find significant gains in math proficiency and reductions in math anxiety among learners. Classroom social networks became tighter and leaders became more central, suggesting broader effects on the learning environment. These results demonstrate that structured peer tutoring can be both effective and scalable, offering a viable pathway to improving foundational learning at scale in low-resource contexts.

Does the rise of a Hindu-nationalist government influence judicial outcomes in India, particularly concerning the Muslim minority? Leveraging close election outcomes and the quasi-random assignment of judges to cases, this paper assesses whether defendant outcomes are affected by the assignment of defendants to a judge with similar religious identity in the presence of a pro-Hindu government. The findings suggest that the judiciary’s decisions remain largely unbiased on religious grounds, despite the Hindu-nationalist ideology of the government. This study contributes to the discourse on the independence of the judiciary in the politically charged context of India.