I investigate the effect of human capital on entrepreneurship using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth - 1979. I find that individuals with higher measured intelligence and self-confidence are more likely to be entrepreneurs. Furthermore I present evidence suggesting that intelligence and...

We estimate the effect of college education on business survival using the NLSY79. The endogeneity of both education and business ownership is accounted for by a competing risks duration model augmented with a college selection equation. Contrary to the previous literature, we fi nd no effect of...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

Swedish elementary school children stopped receiving written end of year report cards following a grading reform in 1982. Gradual implementation of the reform creates an opportunity to investigate the effects of being graded on adult educational attainments and earnings for children in the...

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential and only quantitative evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it...

We evaluate the impact on earnings, pensions, and further labor market outcomes of two parallel educational reforms increasing instructional time in Swedish primary school. The reforms extended the annual term length and compulsory schooling by comparable amounts. We find striking differences in...

Quasi-markets in the provision of public services are increasingly common but also highly contested. We formulate a conceptual framework based on economic theory to describe how quasi-markets differ from traditional markets in five aspects: 1) revenues, costs, and profits, 2) the matching of...

We analyze optimal redistribution in the presence of labor market signaling where innate productive ability is not only unobserved by the government, but also by prospective employers. Our model features signaling in both one and two dimensions, where in the latter case firms have an...

This essay argues that the most crucial institution of any school system is its view of knowledge - from which virtually all other aspects of a school are derived: the content of its curricula, its pedagogical practices, and the incentives that motivate its members. To make this case, we outline...

We investigate the impact of attending a free school in England - that is, a new start-up school that enjoys considerable autonomy while remaining in the state sector. We analyse the effects of two secondary free schools with different teaching philosophies: one follows a "no excuse" paradigm,...