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...

Lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes, both short-run in terms of one-year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings. However, recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other...

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? Researchers using changes in compulsory schooling laws as instruments have typically estimated very high returns to additional schooling that are greater than the corresponding OLS estimates and concluded that the group of individuals who are...

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of...

We introduce two simple new variants of the Jackknife Instrumental Variables (JIVE) estimator for overidentified linear models and show that they are superior to the existing JIVE estimator, significantly improving on its small sample bias properties. We also compare our new estimators to...