We exploit rules of class formation to identify the causal effect of increasing the number of immigrants in a classroom on natives test scores, keeping class size constant (Pure Composition Effect). We explain why this is a relevant policy parameter although it has been neglected so far. We show...

Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates....

We develop a model demonstrating conditions under which firms will invest in the general training of their workers, and show that firms’ incentives to invest in general training are increasing in task complexity. Workers’ heterogeneous observable innate ability affects the variety of tasks...

This paper offers and tests a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for general training they receive. The crucial ingredient in our model is that the current employer has superior information about the worker’s ability relative to other firms. This informational advantage gives the...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

We model educational investment, wages and employment status (full-time, part-time or non-participation) in a frictional world in which heterogeneous workers have different productivities, both at home and in the workplace. We investigate the degree to which there might be under-employment and...

We use a quantile regression framework to investigate the degree to which work-related training affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Human capital theory suggests that the percentage returns to training investments will be the same across the conditional...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital, suffered by children of schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in World War II, children who were ten years old during the conflict...

This paper looks at the effect of quitting on the number of workers trained under conditions of uncertainty about future productivity when workers have both firm-specific and industry-specific skills. A new effect is found which works in the opposite direction to the undertraining result of...

This paper estimates the determinants of the number of work-related training courses, and their impact on expected wages growth, using longitudinal data from the British National Child Development Study. The analysis covers a crucial decade in the working lives of a cohort of young men – from...