Reducing the gender gap in education is a primary goal for many countries. Two major challenges for many girls are the distance to school and their safety when commuting to school. In Zambia, we studied the impact of providing a bicycle to a school-going girl who lives more than 3 km from the...

We investigate the relationship between peers’ abilities and educational outcomes at the end of high school using data from the rich Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) matched to the National Pupil Database of children in state schools in England. In particular, we focus on...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient to deviate from Ramsey's Rule and to distort qualified labour less than nonqualified labour. Furthermore, if the earnings function displays constant elasticity, the...

Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital...

This paper studies a Ramsey optimal taxation model with human capital in an infinite-horizon setting. Contrary to Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi (1997), the human capital production function does not include the current stock of human capital as a production factor. As a result, the return to human...

Bovenberg and Jacobs (2005) and Richter (2009) derive the education efficiency theorem: In a second-best optimum, the education decision is undistorted if the function expressing the stock of human capital features a constant elasticity with respect to education. I drop this assumption. The...

This paper considers the role of school closures in the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. To isolate the impact of the closures from other containment measures and identify a causal effect, we exploit variation in the start and end dates of the summer school and fall holiday across the 16 federal...

Individuals with more years of education generally acquire more training later on in life. Such a relationship may be due to skills learned in early periods increasing returns to educational investments in later periods. This paper addresses the question whether the complementarity between...

In a context of demographic change, European governments seek ways to keep the skill set of the labor force flexible. One option to achieve this goal is widening access to college education to non-traditional students, such as those vocationally trained. Assessing whether this is a promising...

In this article, we analyze whether non-native speakers in the classroom affect the educational achievement and social integration of migrant and native students. In contrast to previous studies, which mainly examine the effect of the share of immigrant pupils, we focus on language heterogeneity...