May internally-evaluated standardized tests - a widespread tool for school accountability and a crucial input in parental school choice and university admissions, have the potential to distort individual decisions and increase inequality in access to resources? I exploit random assignment to external/internal evaluation across the universe of schools in the Spanish region of Madrid to provide novel evidence that the lower average scores attained by externally-evaluated schools is driven by private ones, whose performance falls by a third of a standard deviation relative to public schools. This difference persists after accounting for heterogeneous behavioral responses of students based on soft-skills and gender, which suggests that relying on internally-graded standardized exams for comparing students from different schools may suffer from equality issues when incentives for manipulation are not uniformly distributed across school types.

What determines long-term mental health and its intergenerational correlation? Exploiting variation in unemployment rates upon labor market entry across Australian states and co- horts, we provide novel evidence that the mental health of daughters is affected by the labor market entry conditions of their parents. In particular, a one standard deviation shock to the unemployment rate upon parental labor market entry worsens daughters’ mental health during adolescence by 13% of a standard deviation. This effect is accompanied by lower levels of satisfaction with their health, home, financial situation, and overall life. A medi- ation analysis suggests that a sizable proportion (24%) of the impacts on the descendants’ mental health is explained by the worse mental health of their parents at mid-life. We do not detect any impact of parental labor market entry conditions among sons.

There is increasing evidence in favor of non-unitary models of the household. Moreover, gender norms and values have been shown to be transmitted across generations and to affect intra-household allocations. I lever a unique dataset from China containing each spouse’s contributions to income, market, and home hours of parents and children (after forming their own household) to uncover a strong positive correlation between the female spouse’s relative contributions across two generations in the absence of reverse causality. This is robust to the inclusion of a rich vector of controls and provincial fixed effects. Exploiting large exogenous changes in education brought along by the Chinese 1986 Compulsory Education Law I find that the degree of intergenerational transmission was disrupted by the reform, and that this happened heterogeneously across groups with different parental relative contributions. I further show that this was driven by a change in the attitudes towards gender norms, which suggests that transmission occurs at least partly through socialization and that policies can have a multiplier effect both within and across generations.

We evaluate a holistic reading intervention involving 600 third-grade students in Chilean schools catering to disadvantaged populations. The intervention features an adaptive computer game designed to identify and improve weaknesses in literacy and cognitive skills, and is complemented by a mobile library and advice to parents to increase student’s interest and parental involvement. On one side, we find an improvement in performance on a nation-wide, standardized language test by 13% of a standard deviation. On the other side, we find that treated students are 10–30% of a standard deviation more likely to have higher academic aspirations, to believe that their performance is better than that of their peers and that courses are easy, and to have a more internal locus-of-control. Our results show that cognitive and non-cognitive skills can be changed through a short, light-touch, and cost-effective education technology intervention.

Differences in academic achievement across Indian castes are both large and persistent. I make use of rich individual data to explore how classroom caste composition affects academic progress as well as the mechanisms at work. Exploiting exogenous assignment of students to classes and teachers I find that a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of low-caste classmates leads to a fall of around 2% of a standard deviation in the mathematics score and to much smaller effects in English. This phenomenon is mediated through lower effort exerted by the students, which itself stems from the students’ worsened perception about the extent to which their teachers value them. This non-cognitive channel, which has not been previously identified in the peer effects literature, suggests that the use of a fairly malleable input such as more open and receptive teachers with regards to low-caste students would be an appropriate policy.