Countries across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are in their third decade of independence. What impact does this have on the skills premium and does accession to the European Union have an impact on the returns to education? The returns to education in 28 transition and 20 non-transition...

This paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...

Even the most egalitarian education systems employ high-stakes tests to regulate the transition from universal secondary education to selective academic programs that open doors to skilled, well-paid professions. This gives parents a strong incentive to invest substantial resources in improving...

As China's firms upgrade their position in the quality ladder, vocational education may become more important. In this paper, we study returns to secondary vocational education in China paying attention to individual heterogeneity. We use instrumental variables based on geographical and...

This study examines the impact that over-education has on the earnings of private and public sector workers in Trinidad and Tobago. Using individual person's data from the Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) for the period 1991-2015, the returns of over-educated workers is...

This paper surveys the emerging economics literature on the relationship between employee training and firm performance. Most studies find very high returns to training, at least from the perspective of firms, indicating that the costs of training can be recouped in short periods of time. These...

This paper presents the first analysis for Arkansas using 2024 CPS data to examine education's impact on earnings and returns to investment. Average returns are 7.7%, higher for women (9%). University education yields even more: 8.8% overall, 8.1% for men, and 10.8% for women. With full...

This study, using original survey data of 10,000 individuals, analyzes the possible impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics on employment. The first interest of this study is to ascertain, from the viewpoint of workers, what types of worker characteristics are associated with the...

In this paper we investigate whether human capital accumulation, during adolescence, depends on home investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) equipment. Using micro-level data, for children aged 17-18 years old, drawn from the Greek part of the European Union Statistics on...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...