The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the empirical evidence on the private returns to education in Italy. First, we show that, whilst returns to education in Italy (based on gross wages) are in line with the European average, educational attainment is generally much lower...

This paper uses U.S. Current Population Survey data to develop new "dynamic" and "expected dynamic" rates of return to education for synthetic cohorts of males and females for 1967-95 that take trends in earnings at older ages and annual changes in education institutional costs into account....

This paper presents a model showing an incentive for a group of people to vote for higher tuition fees, even if these fees have no quality effect. The incentive is based on a non-monetary influence on utility, namely the social status or prestige of graduating. The basic assumption is that the...

In this paper, the relationship between the school attendance decision and economic incentives is investigated using data from Zambia. A logit model for school attendance is estimated, and it is found that school attendance is not particularly sensitive to changes in costs, quality, or poverty....

Economists and educational historians have put forward two major kinds of explanations for the coincidence between the industrial revolution and the development of mass public schooling in the United States. Industrial change, some maintain, created a demand for technicians, managers, skilled...

In this paper, we empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital. Using a new data set on literacy in colonial India, we find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although we...

This paper studies the long-run macroeconomic, distributional and welfare effects of tuition policy and student loans. We therefore form a rich model of risky human capital investment based on the seminal work of Heckman, Lochner and Taber (1998). We extend their original model by variable labor...

University research has formed the foundation for many of the most significant U.S. technological advancements. However, many more ideas are left on the shelves and in the laboratories of academe, waiting to be discovered. Although thousands of university innovations have been transformed into...

This paper uncovers differences in social mobility between rich and poor families. The paper shows, in particular, that borrowing constraints retard social mobility among the poor by preventing poor parents from investing optimally in the their children's human capital. This evidence contradicts...