Financial aid from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF) provides exceptionally generous support to a college population similar to that served by a host of state aid programs. In conjunction with STBF, we randomly assigned aid awards to thousands of Nebraska high school graduates from low-income, minority, and first-generation college households. Randomly- assigned STBF awards boost bachelor's (BA) degree completion for students targeting four-year schools by about 8 points.

Reports of rising income segregation in the United States have been brought into question by the observation that post-2000 estimates are upwardly biased because of a reduction in the sample sizes on which they are based. Recent studies have offered estimates of this sample-count bias using public data. We show here that there are two substantial sources of systematic bias in estimating segregation levels: bias associated with sample size and bias associated with using weighted sample data.

Without the opioid epidemic, American life expectancy would not have declined prior to 2020. In turn, the epidemic was sparked by the development and marketing of a new generation of prescription opioids and provider behavior is still helping to drive it. There is little relationship between the opioid crisis and contemporaneous measures of labor market opportunity. Cohorts and areas that experienced poor labor market conditions do show lagged increases in opioid mortality, but the effect is modest relative to the scale of the epidemic.

This paper estimates peer effects both from older to younger siblings and from parents to children in academic fields of study. Our setting is secondary school in Sweden, where admissions to oversubscribed fields is determined based on a student's GPA. Using an RD design, we find strong spillovers in field choices that depend on the gender mix of siblings and whether the field is gender conforming. There are also large intergenerational effects from fathers and mothers to sons, except in female-dominated fields, but little effect for daughters.

School suspension and expulsion are important forms of punishment that disproportionately affect Black students, with long-term consequences for educational attainment and other indicators of wellbeing. Prior research identifies three mechanisms that help account for racial disparities in suspension and expulsion: between-school sorting, differences in student behaviors, and differences in the treatment and support of students with similar behaviors.