States increasingly require prospective teachers to pass exams for program completion and initial licensure, including the recent controversial roll-out of the educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA).  We leverage the quasi-experimental setting of different adoption timing by states and analyze multiple data sources containing a national sample of prospective teachers and students of new teachers in the US. With extensive controls of concurrent policies, we find that the edTPA reduced prospective teachers in traditional route programs, less-selective and minority-concentrated universities. Contrary to the policy intention, we do not find evidence that edTPA increased student test scores.

Increased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl's educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl's performance in mathematics. This exposure also cultivates gendered attitudes towards mathematics and STEM professions. The influence of peer mothers increases with network density and when the girl has a distant relationship with her parents. As falsification tests against unobserved confounding factors, we find that the exposure to stay-at-home peer mothers does not affect boys' performance, nor do we find that stay-at-home peer fathers affect girls' outcomes. 

We study the substitution between licensed and unlicensed workers and the quality effect of employing licensed professionals on firms. Leveraging a quasi-licensure mandate of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) on audit committees of publicly-traded firms, this paper studies the employment spillover and quality effects of licensing at the firm level. Assembling multiple data sources, we identify independent directors with relevant licenses and the quality of accounting reports for more than 5,200 publicly-traded firms. Exploiting plausibly exogenous year-by-firm variation in fixed-effect models, the licensure mandate of SOX significantly increases the appointment of certified public accountants (CPAs) at the expense of other types of professionals at the board level. We find a precise zero effect for the presence of CPAs on audit committees on the need to refile financial statements.