Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

This paper tests whether and how two education policies: (i) increasing the length of compulsory education and (ii) introducing foreign languages into compulsory school curricula, affect subsequent migration across European countries. We construct a novel data base that includes information on...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...

In this article, we document the evolution of the cognitive skills gap across Canada. We use PISA tests scores over 7 cycles, from 2000 to 2018, to provide an exhaustive portrait of the evolution of the tests scores distribution over time and by parental socioeconomic status. We find that the...

In 2000, the OECD began the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds. For each survey, Canadian students placed well above the OECD average and remain among the top performers for each domain assessed (reading, math and...