Is human capital a robust predictor of good institutions? Using a new institutional quality measure, the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), we find that cognitive skill measures are significant, robust, and large in magnitude. We use two databases of cognitive skills: estimates of...

School closures during the 2020 pandemic forced countries to rapidly adopt distance learning, with uncertain effects on education inequalities. Using PISA 2018 data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, we find that students unable to learn remotely, because of a lack of ICT...

This study was prepared by Annika B. Bergbauer while she was working at the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education. It was completed in March 2019 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in July 2019. It consists of four self-contained...

The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the literature. Among the benefits, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is its potential to mitigate educational inequality. However, some evidence also suggests that the positive...

This paper uses a new measure of human capital, which distinguishes both quality and quantity components, to estimate the long-term effect of the COVID-19-related school closures on aggregate productivity through the human capital channel. Productivity losses build up over time and are estimated...

This paper provides a new measure of human capital using PISA and PIAAC surveys, and mean years of schooling. The new measure is a cohort-weighted average of past PISA scores (representing the quality of education) of the working age population and the corresponding mean years of schooling...

This paper uses a new measure of human capital, which distinguishes both quality and quantity components, to estimate the long-term effect of the Covid-19-related school closures on aggregate productivity through the human capital channel. Productivity losses build up over time and are estimated...