We study the effects of the large expansion in British educational attainment that took place for cohorts born between 1970 and 1975. Using the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that the expansion caused men to increase education by about a year on average and gain about 8% higher wages;...

Good understanding on the human capital externalities is important for both policy makers and social science researchers. Economists have speculated for at least a century that the social returns to education may exceed the private returns. In this paper, using the longitudinal data from China...

College graduates tend to earn more than non-graduates but it is difficult to ascertain how much of this empirical association between wages and college degree is due to the causal effect of a college degree and how much is due to unobserved factors that influence both wages and education (e.g....

While much empirical work concerns job tenure, this paper introduces the concept of school tenure - the length of time one student has been in a given school. I examine whether and how school tenure impacts students' output using rich cohort data on England's secondary schools. Ordinary Least...

In recent years there has been a plethora of empirical papers by economists concerning the effects of academic rank in school or college on subsequent outcomes of students. We review this recent literature, describing the difficult identification and measurement issues, the assumptions and...

Much attention is focused on finding ways to encourage females to study STEM in school and college but what actually happens once women complete a STEM degree? We use the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey to trace out gender differences in STEM persistence over the career. We find a continuous...

Much research shows that students take account of their perceived comparative advantage in mathematics relative to verbal skills when choosing college majors and career tracks. There is also evidence for an important role for comparative advantage in explaining the gender gap in college STEM...

While gender differences in the decision of what to study at undergraduate level are much studied, there is relatively little attention paid to subsequent study decisions of graduates. Given the increased importance of graduate education in recent decades, these decisions can have major labour...

We develop a simple semiparametric framework for combining censored and uncensored samples so that the resulting estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal, and use all information optimally. No nonparametric smoothing is required to implement our estimators. To illustrate our results in...

A variety of public campaigns, including the Just Say No campaign of the 1980s and 1990s that encouraged teenagers to Just Say No to Drugs, are based on the premise that teenagers are very susceptible to peer influences. Despite this, very little is known about the effect of school peers on the...