I examine teenage pregnancy in Ghana, focusing on the role and interplay of Ghanaian and English reading skills, formal educational attainment, and adult literacy program participation. Pursuing several alternative identification strategies three main results are established. First, I confirm...

This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

This study uses the longitudinal data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationships between human capital and labour market participation and employment status among recently arrived/approved humanitarian migrants. It includes attention to the heterogeneity of...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...

We present a novel theory that immigrants facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. Immigrants whose human capital is not immediately transferable to the host country face lower opportunity costs of investing in new skills or methods and will...

Even the most egalitarian education systems employ high-stakes tests to regulate the transition from universal secondary education to selective academic programs that open doors to skilled, well-paid professions. This gives parents a strong incentive to invest substantial resources in improving...

We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore...

In this paper we study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education, i.e. those activities carried out during leisure time and outside formal education courses which boost individuals’ human and social capital. For immigrants the private investment in these activities is...

By using firm-level data provided by the fourth round of the (Italian) Community Innovation Survey (CIS 2012), this paper explores whether the implementation of specific changes in work organisation within a firm influences its innovation performance, not only directly, but also via reinforcing...