Whether targeted foundational instruction yields broad, long-term human capital gains is central to education policy but largely untested. We provide causal evidence from Zambia's government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. After two years, a randomized trial shows the...

Most impact assessments of agricultural training evaluate one-time interventions over short time horizons. However, farmers may initially show enthusiasm for a new technology but subsequently dis-adopt it after a trial period, while others may adopt practices gradually over time. This study...

Using 1980-2019 Danish matched employer-employee data, we unpack the rise in wage sorting - the correlation between worker and firm wage fixed effects (Abowd et al., 1999) - from 0.06 to 0.18. The rise is driven entirely by reallocation of employment from persistently low-sorting to persistently...

Research on teacher preparation programs (TPPs) continues to debate the extent to which program quality meaningfully shapes teacher effectiveness. While early evidence from highincome contexts documented nontrivial differences across programs, more recent studies suggest that most variation in...

This study investigates how skilled labor influences the development of the secondary sector in emerging economies, using China as a case study. We focus on the transitional process in which manufacturing growth shifts from labor-intensive expansion toward productivity-driven industrial...

Expected goals (xG) are widely used to evaluate football performance. However, it is unclear whether players who consistently outperform their xG do so because of skill or because of luck. To our knowledge, this paper provides the first meta-analytic estimate of between-player heterogeneity in...

Socioemotional skills (SES) — such as self-efficacy, assertiveness, and negotiation — are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of labor market success. Emerging evidence suggests that psychology-based programs that strengthen SES can improve economic outcomes in low- and middle-income...

Across many countries, young adults face a persistent skills mismatch, with firms reporting difficulty finding candidates with adequate soft skills. In Rwanda, young women face particularly acute barriers to securing employment. This study evaluates a two-week intensive soft skills training...

Socioemotional skills programs are widely used to promote economic empowerment, yet their returns may vary by skill-type and gender. This paper evaluates a socioemotional skills intervention for 4,500 agribusiness owners in a large-scale government program in Nigeria. Using a randomized...

Digital transformation is a key driver of economic and social progress, and assessing its evolution is essential for guiding public policies. In the European Union (EU), until 2022 the European Commission published the quantitative values of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI); however,...

High rates of unemployment and non-participation in the labor market are often attributed to labor market mismatch. This paper examines the mismatch between job seekers' expectations and Egypt's labor market realities. For the non-employed, analyses examine reservation wages and what occupations...

We quantify the contribution of firm-level technological change to skill demand and aggregate inequality in the presence of imperfect competition in the labor market. We show that skill-biased technological change increases both the firm-level skill ratio and the skill premium, while other...

Attracting and retaining a high-quality teacher workforce is a central challenge for education policy, and higher teacher salaries are often proposed as a solution. The LEARNS Act increased Arkansas's minimum teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000, guaranteed all teachers a minimum raise of...

Context: The Fourth Industrial Revolution has accelerated the integration of automation technologies into the world of work, raising important questions about the future of Vocational Education and Training (VET). While existing literature has primarily focused on the labor market impacts of...

We use population-level administrative data covering secondary school students in England to study how mathematical and verbal skills shape education and labour market outcomes. Following cohorts completing national exams at age 16 through higher education and into employment until age 34, we...

This paper examines how proposed U.S. restrictions on international students would affect the nation's STEM workforce and long-run economic growth. Focusing on the most common pipeline from U.S. universities to the labor market, we show that international education is the principal mechanism by...

Mainly through regression discontinuity designs, Khanna (2023a) studies the impacts of a primaryschooling expansion in India in the 1990s. Absent from the data set are four districts close tothe modeled treatment discontinuity. Incorporating them cuts the impact of intention to treat onschooling...

In recent years, the topic of green transitions has attracted considerable attention. Notably, these transitions are often framed as a skills issue, reflecting perceived gaps in the technical skills required for green technologies. Moreover, skills are frequently presented as central to ensuring...

We examine optimal government education expenditure policies in the form of cash transfers to school-aged children, with the objectives of enhancing intergenerational income mobility and reducing the skill premium. Using a calibrated overlapping generations (OLG) model tailored to recent...

This paper provides the first comprehensive, cross-country evidence on the wage returns to digital skills, using more than 67 million job postings from 29 countries between 2021 and 2024. The paper develops a harmonized digital skills taxonomy and examines returns across extensive (any digital...

Digital transformation is rapidly reshaping economies and labor markets worldwide, creating new opportunities while demanding a workforce equipped with relevant digital competencies. For Zambia, a country with one of the youngest populations in the world—this transformation presents both...

Exceptional talent accounts for a disproportionate share of innovation, yet many individuals with exceptional ability may never realize their potential. Whether expanding access to advanced training generates learning gains remains an open question. We study this using a randomized controlled...

China's One-Child Policy (OCP) restricted most couples to a single birth, leading to a rapid increase in the prevalence of only children. Using longitudinal data and a regression discontinuity design around the policy's start, we estimate the effects on grandchildren's human capital. We find...

Managers of actively managed funds do not maintain a constant investment style. Instead, their factor loadings change over time. These changes are especially large following quarters with extreme returns and fund flows and arise from both active portfolio reallocations and passive style drift....

This study examines how automation, measured by industrial robot adoption and artificial intelligence (AI) exposure, is associated with labor market and production outcomes across Europe. Using a panel dataset covering 32 European countries and 18 industries from 1994 to 2019, we analyze the...

This paper studies the relative importance of teacher-student match effects and general teacher effectiveness in producing student learning, and quantifies gains from alternative teacher assignments. We estimate a framework that separates these components, allowing match quality to vary with...

The rapid evolution of technology is reshaping labor markets by altering skill demands and job profiles. This paper introduces a novel skill-based measure of occupational technology intensity - the Occupational Technology Skill Share (OTSS) - that distinguishes between manual, digital, and...

This paper studies the causal impact of language skills on human capital accumulation, labor market outcomes, and job characteristics of childhood immigrants across European countries. Using PIAAC data, we adopt an instrumental variable strategy based on the critical age hypothesis and...

We develop a novel firm-level indicator of Artificial Intelligence adoption in Europe (MAP-AI) by extracting information on AI usage from more than three million firm websites from Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg (2016-2024) using a Large Language Model. The indicator captures realized...

The US government in 2025 imposed a $100,000 tax on each high-skill foreign worker entering with an H-1B work visa. The only public economic justification calculates the tax to offset an estimated wage penalty for H-1B workers relative to US natives. But this estimate suffers from substantial...

Non-traditional platform work has grown rapidly in the Philippines amid technological change and longstanding labor-market constraints. Using nationally representative data from the 2025 Jobs and Skills Survey (JSS), this study provides a detailed profile of workers engaged in these emerging...

We use novel data from a survey of nearly 750 corporate executives to study the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on productivity and the workforce. We document substantial heterogeneity in AI adoption across firms, with more than half having already invested, though many smaller firms are...

The IFS Deaton Review has been a major interdisciplinary project studying the causes and consequences of inequalities. The Review has studied inequalities related to education, health, income, wealth, political power, geography, gender, ethnicity and social mobility. This report draws lessons...