A growing literature examining labor market returns to college major is motivated by large returns to skill. Prior research focuses on mean effects rather than earnings growth and variability. Using administrative data from Texas, we find that mean differences mask important features of the returns to college majors. First, earnings growth varies across fields. Second, there is considerable effect heterogeneity across workers. Third, major choice affects earnings variability within workers over time. We use our results to simulate a lifecyle utility model and compare mid-career utility and mean earnings returns across fields while highlighting the important role of risk preferences.

We estimate the impact of incentive strength on achievement under a group-based teacher incentive pay program. The system provides variation in the share of students in a subject-grade that a teacher instructs, which proxies for incentive strength. We find that achievement on incentivized exams, but not nonincentivized exams, improves when incentives strengthen. For the incentivized exams, we find that effects fade out monotonically as a teacher's portion of the group increases to between 20 and 30 percentage and are larger for teachers with low-achieving students. Calculations based off these estimates show modest positive effects of the program overall.

I use a long panel with broad grade coverage to establish whether charter schools affect cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. Schools that begin as charters generate large improvements in discipline and attendance but not test scores, with the exception of math in middle schools. This suggests improvements in noncognitive but not cognitive skills, although these improvements do not persist if students return to regular public schools. Charters that convert from regular public schools have little impact on either skill type. These results are robust to potential biases from selection off of precharter trends, attrition, and persistence.