Among better-educated employed men, the fraction of full-time full-year (FTFY) workers is quite high and stable -- around 90 percent -- over time in the U.S. Among those with lower education levels, however, this fraction is much lower and considerably more volatile, moving within the range of...

In this paper, based on report published by the Bulgarian National Audit Office with reference to public university graduates entering the labor market, I try to outline possible ways to overcome labor market failure problem forced by inefficient public university funding. It is the Bulgarian...

We develop a model in which individuals choose education to improve their earnings and regulate the cultural traits they acquire via social transmission. When education makes individuals more receptive to mainstream culture, minority groups underinvest in education as a form of cultural...

One of the most important policy goals in industrialized countries is to increase the skill level of the labor force by life-long-learning strategies. In this paper our aim is to explain to what extent the variation in training investments is determined either by (observed and unobserved)...

This paper analyzes the reasons for the large and persistent gaps in transitions after secondary school between native pupils compared to second- and third generation immigrant pupils in Germany. I first document that differences in parental background, skills (such as school degrees or test...

Inequality of opportunity strikes when two children with the same academic performance are sent to diff erent quality schools because their parents di ffer in socio-economic status. Based on a novel dataset for Germany, we demonstrate that children are signi ficantly less likely to enter the...

The gap in university enrollment by parental education is large and persistent in many countries. In our representative survey, 74 percent of German university graduates, but only 36 percent of those without a university degree favor a university education for their children. The latter are more...

This paper investigates the role self-confidence plays in college applications. Using incentivized experiments, we measure the self-confidence of more than 2,000 students applying to colleges in France. This data reveals that the best female and low-SES students significantly underestimate their...

This paper studies heterogeneity in schooling decisions by socio-economic status (SES) in response to a repeal of achievement-based admissions requirements (i.e. binding track recommendations) in Germany's between-school tracking system. The main contribution is to show that while previously...