Black and Devereux gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National

In this paper, we estimate the extent of ability peer effects in the classroom and explore the underlying mechanisms through which these peer effects operate. We identify as high ability students those who are enrolled at least one year ahead of their birth cohort (“skippers”) and as low ability students those who are enrolled at least one year behind their birth cohort (“repeaters”). We show that while there are marked differences between the academic performance and behavior of skippers/repeaters and the regular students, the status of skippers and repeaters is mostly determined by first grade; therefore, it is unlikely to have been affected by their classroom peers (and to suffer from the reflection problem). Using within school variation in the proportion of these low and high ability students across cohorts of middle and high school students in Israel, we find that the proportion of high achieving peers in class has no effect on the academic performance of most regular students but it does affect positively the outcomes of the brightest among the regular students. In contrast, the proportion of low achieving peers has a negative effect on the performance of regular students, especially those located at the lower end of the ability distribution. An exploration of the underlying mechanisms of these peer effects shows that, relative to regular students, repeaters report that teachers are better in the individual treatment of students and in the instilment of capacity for individual study. However, a higher proportion of low achieving students results in a deterioration of teachers ’ pedagogical practices has detrimental effects on the quality of inter-student relationships and the relationships between teachers and students, and somewhat increases the level of violence and classroom disruptions. * We thank the Ministry of Education for assisting with the data, and comments from seminar participants

Many states require children to reach five years of age by a specified calendar date in order to begin kindergarten. We use birth certificate records from 1999 to 2004 to assess whether parents systematically time childbirth before school cutoff dates to capture the option value of sending their child to school at a relatively young age, thereby avoiding a year of child care costs. Testing for discontinuities in the distribution of births around cutoff dates, we find no evidence that the financial benefits influence the timing of birth. Similarly, we find no systematic discontinuities in average mothers ’ characteristics or babies ’ health outcomes around cutoff dates. Timing in the neighborhood of school cutoffs occurs only when the cutoffs coincide with weekends or holidays, which may have implications for recent research that assumes birth dates in the neighborhood of cutoffs are essentially randomly assigned.

w o r k i n g p a p e r

Abstract: College success often lags behind college attendance. One theory as to why students do not complete college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching. Over the course of two separate school years, InsideTrack, a student coaching service, provided coaching to students attending public, private, and proprietary universities. Most of the participating students were non-traditional college students enrolled in degree programs. The participating universities and InsideTrack randomly assigned students to be coached. The coach contacted students regularly to develop a clear vision of their goals, to guide them in connecting their daily activities to their long term goals, and to support them in building skills, including time management, self advocacy, and study skills. Students who were randomly assigned to a coach were more likely to persist during the treatment period and were more likely to be attending the university one year after the coaching had ended. Coaching also proved a more cost-effective method of achieving retention and completion gains when compared to previously studied interventions such as increased financial aid. The authors thank Brent Evens, Eric Taylor, and Jon Valant for helpful comments. The study described in this paper was an independent evaluation of the InsideTrack program; the research team has no financial relationship with InsideTrack.

herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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H istorically, kindergarten marked children’s!rst entry into formal, primarily public education in the United States. However, increasingly children are coming to kindergarten having spent some time in structured, center-based care. For example, 63.8 % of children born in 2001 were enrolled in a center-based program the year prior to kindergarten entry (Flanagan & McPhee 2009). Kindergarten might not mark children’s entry into formal, structured classrooms, but it continues to be the!rst year for which children’s experiences are governed by policies set within the public K–12 education system.1 As a result, kindergarten provides a bridge within early childhood, linking a time during which children spend their years in a wide range of settings prior to kindergarten, and primary education, where children spend their days in a more structured setting learning with their agemates from a common teacher, teaching to a shared set of expectations and standards (at least within classrooms, districts, and typically, states). It also marks the “line in the sand ” between early learning standards (for children 5 and younger) that address all domains to primary and secondary education (K–12) standards, which focus on academic content. Although the early childhood period spans birth through

Dropouts have high crime rates, but is there a direct causal link? This study, utilizing administrative data for 6 cohorts of public school children in North Carolina, demonstrates that those born just after the cut date for enrolling in public kindergarten are more likely to drop out of high school before graduation and to commit a felony offense by age 19. We present suggestive evidence that dropout mediates criminal involvement. Paradoxically, these late-entry students outperform their grade peers academically while still in school, which helps account for the fact that they are less likely to become juvenile delinquents. (JEL I28, J13, K42)

Whether children should start school at an ear-lier or later age continues to be of interest to a variety of stakeholders. First and foremost, par-ents of prospective school entrants want to know whether holding their child back from school for additional time is beneficial for their child in the short- and long-run. Policymakers want to know what school entry age policies would ensure that children start school ready to learn. And finally, educators want to know what malleable factors can improve children’s school performance and readiness for the labor market. This issue is controversial because there are theoretical arguments supporting both early and later school entry. On one hand, proponents of later school entry age support the notion that delayed school entrance will provide children an extra year of out-of-school time for additional family nurturing and biological maturation. On the other hand, opponents argue that the instruc-tional context of school can be more important than the additional year of biological maturation