This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

We study the relationship between age and literacy skills in Canada, Norway and the U.S. – countries that represent a wide range of literacy outcomes -- using data from the 1994 and 2003 International Adult Literacy Surveys. In cross-sectional data there is a weak negative partial...

Literacy is central to the improvement and betterment of any society. Individuals cannot fully engage in social and political discourse, and are more likely to become less-than-equals in society without basic literacy to pursue their goals. On the individual level, more literate individuals tend...

L’alphabétisme est capital pour l’amélioration de toute société. Tout un chacun ne peut participer entièrement au discours social et politique, et aura sans doute une position inférieure en société, s’il ne possède pas l’alphabétisme de base lui permettant d’atteindre ses...

Adoption of innovations by firms and workers is an important part of the process of technological change. Many prior studies find that highly educated workers tend to adopt new technologies faster than those with less education. Such positive correlations between the level of education and the...

As school leaders, principals can influence student achievement in a number of ways, such as: hiring and firing teachers, monitoring instruction, and maintaining student discipline, among others. We measure the effect of individual principals on gains in student math and reading achievement...

Studies based on instrumental variable techniques suggest that the value of a high school education is large for potential dropouts, yet we know much less about the size of the benefiÂ…t for students who will go on to post-secondary education. To help Â…fill this gap, I measure the...

There has been growing interest in using specific genetic markers as instrumental variables in attempts to assess causal relationships between health status and socioeconomic outcomes, including human capital accumulation. In this paper we use a combination of family fixed effects and genetic...

Using U.S. and Canadian census data I exploit the massive out migration of approximately 1 million French-Canadians who moved mainly to New England between 1865 and 1930 to look at how the educational attainment and enrollment patterns of their descendants compare with those of same aged...

This study investigates the causal effects of education on individuals’ transitions between employment and unemployment, with particular focus on the extent to which education improves re-employment outcomes among unemployed workers. Given that positive correlations between education and...