Economic growth in the East Asian economies was remarkable during the latter part of the 20th century, starting with Japan just after World War II, followed by the East Asian Tigers and "tiger cubs" after that and, most recently, the People's Republic of China and India. The high, sustained...

This paper evaluates the impact of the Australian Baby Bonus - a Jason Gaitz one-off cash transfer - on various aspects of child human capital development. Using high-quality longitudinal cohort data and difference-in-difference models, we compare the outcomes of cohort members whose younger...

Skills are widely regarded as being necessary for boosting productivity, stimulating innovation, and creating new jobs, while skill mismatches are often cited as being responsible for a lack of dynamism in the labor market. However, heavy investments in technical and vocational training programs...

We model a higher education system that admits students according to their admission signal (e.g., matriculation GPA, SAT), which is, in turn, affected by their cognitive ability and socioeconomic background. We show that subsidizing education loans increases neither human capital stock nor...

This paper examines the effects of a substantial change in publicly funded paid parental leave in Germany on child development and socio-economic development gaps. For children born before January 1, 2007, parental leave benefits were means-tested and paid for up to 24 months after childbirth....

Homeownership has important economic implications for society and individuals. At the social level is the greater civic engagement that homeowners tend to exhibit, while at the individual level an important outcome associated with housing tenure is better education outcomes, especially for...

This paper looks at the spillover effects of grants under the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) on human capital investments in conflict-affected Northern Uganda. The YOP grant was primarily aimed at providing start-up money to groups of underemployed young people, and in practice worked...

This paper studies the role of ethnicity in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. Relying on heteroskedasticity to identify parameters in the presence of endogenous regressors, I revisit Borjas ethnic capital hypothesis. I find evidence that the OLS estimates of the...

Immigrants who start with low earnings, such as family-based immigrants, experience higher earnings growth than immigrants who are recruited for specific jobs (employment-based immigrants). This occurs because family-based immigrants with lower initial earnings invest in human capital at higher...

This paper uses seven nationally representative time use surveys in Latin America to identify key stylized facts regarding the quantity and quality of parental time investment on the skill formation of their children. Traditional models of household behavior have failed to account for the...

This paper explores families' investment in skills development through education in a high-inequality, low-education quality country such as Mexico, comparing it to a lower-inequality, higher-quality education country such as the United States. The paper uses a series of high-quality Household...

Lead pollution is consistently linked to cognitive and behavioral impairments, yet little is known about the benefits of public health interventions for children exposed to lead. This paper estimates the long-term impacts of early-life interventions (e.g. lead remediation, nutritional...

We exploit time and spatial variation generated by the commodities boom to measure the effect of natural resources on human capital formation in Peru, a country with low governance indicators. Combining test scores from over two million students and district-level administrative data on mining...

Despite the increased attachment of women to the labour force in nearly all developed countries, a stubborn gender pay gap remains. This chapter provides a review of the economics literature on the gender wage gap, with an emphasis on developed countries. We begin with an overview of the trends...

Despite the increased attachment of women to the labour force in nearly all developed countries, a stubborn gender pay gap remains. This chapter provides a review of the economics literature on the gender wage gap, with an emphasis on developed countries. We begin with an overview of the trends...

This study investigates the well-researched relationship between migration and the formation of human capital in the source region using a novel instrument: the existence of a local train station. We make use of Chinese panel data and of the fact that the decision to build a new train station is...

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...

This paper empirically investigates the impacts of Peru's Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme JUNTOS upon educational outcomes of beneficiary children. The findings associate Juntos participation with higher overall enrolment rates and grades of schooling for children aged 12 to 18 years....

The link between air pollution and human health is well-documented in the epidemiology and economic literature. Recently, an increasing body of research has shown that air pollution-even in relatively low doses-also affects educational outcomes across several distinct age groups and varying...

More than two of every five students who enrolled in college in 2007 failed to graduate by 2013. Peer tutoring services offer one approach toward improving learning outcomes in higher education. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment designed to increase take-up of university tutoring...

Was bringt ein höherer Bildungsabschluss unter dem Strich? Wer eine Lehre macht, nimmt während der Ausbildungszeit als Lehrling Einkommenseinbußen im Vergleich zu einer ungelernten Tätigkeit in Kauf, hofft dann in der Folge aber auf höhere Arbeitseinkommen. Noch viel mehr gilt dies für...

We examine the generalizability of internally valid estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks. This temporal external validity is shown to depend upon the distribution of the aggregate shocks and the interaction between these...

Analyzing how working students weather personal economic shocks is increasingly important as the fraction of college students working substantial hours has increased dramatically over the past few decades. Using administrative data on Ohio college students linked to matched firm-worker data on...

Deutschland investiert zu wenig in Bildung–darüber sind sich Wissenschaft und Medien einig. Dass diese Investitionen überwiegend öffentlich finanziert werden müssen, wird nicht bezweifelt. Die Frage ist aber, ob es mit den in der Vergangenheit getätigten Bildungsinvestitionen gelungen...

In a context of demographic change, European governments seek ways to keep the skill set of the labor force flexible. One option to achieve this goal is widening access to college education to non-traditional students, such as those vocationally trained. Assessing whether this is a promising...

Over the past decades, globalization has led to a huge increase in the migration of workers, as well as students. This paper develops a simple two-step model that describes the decisions of an individual vis-à-vis education and migration, and presents a unified model, wherein the two migration...

Military service is an important vehicle through which young Americans invest in their human capital. Using internal military data, we show that county-level exposure to U.S. combat casualties during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars decreased the supply of new soldiers in that county, and changed...

This paper studies how individuals believe human capital investments will affect their future career and family life. We conducted a survey of high-ability currently enrolled college students and elicited beliefs about how their choice of college major, and whether to complete their degree at...

In this study we review the literature on the relationship between landownership inequality and the accumulation of human capital in historical perspective. Furthermore we provide new evidence on the relationship between landownership inequality and marriage patterns at the county level in...

Ongoing demographic change will lead to a relative scarcity of raw labor to the effect that output growth will be decreasing in the next decades, a secular stagnation. As physical capital will be relatively abundant, this decrease of output will be accompanied by reductions of asset returns. We...

Millions of people enter (or remain in) countries without permission as they flee violence, war, or economic hardship. Regularization policies that offer residence and work rights have multiple and multi-layered effects on the economy and society, but they always directly affect the labor market...