We exploit admission cutoffs to secondary schools to study the effects of general academically oriented, versus vocational secondary schooling on cognitive and non-cognitive skills using a regression discontinuity design. We measure these skills using the Finnish Defence Forces Basic Skills Test...

Distinguishing between short-run and long-run outcomes we provide new insight into the relationship between education and migration. We examine the specific link between the acquisition of high levels of human capital in the form of university education in Turkey and migration to Germany. We...

Policies that extend the school day in elementary school provide an implicit childcare subsidy for families. As such, they can affect parents' time allocation and family dynamics. This paper examines how extending the school day affects families by focusing on marriage dissolution. We exploit...

We investigate the long-run impact of college remedial education on students' academic performance and employment status. By implementing a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design we show that attending remedial courses positively affects the probability to get a university degree, whereas no...

In many OECD countries, women are underrepresented in the highest status, highest paying positions and overrepresented in the lowest status, lowest paying positions. One potential reason for this inequity is the “motherhood penalty,” where women with children face more roadblocks in hiring...

We document the evolution of intergenerational income (IGI ) inequality, measured as the relative income between old and young individuals, using harmonised microdata from 42 countries at different stages of economic development. In the last 20 years, IGI inequality has increased (in favour of...

An important role is ascribed to students' social networks in explaining both social and ethnic differentials in educational achievement and attainment. For example, students' social networks are assumed to influence their probability of success by providing educationally-relevant resources and...

This work presents a project called "ESium Project", whose main objective is to create new spaces for social participation and a relationship between two different age groups: the young Social Education students and the elderly. It has a double purpose: to promote that reciprocal space for...

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...

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...

We examine whether and how teachers' major fields of study affect students' achievement, exploiting within-student variation across subfields in natural science (i.e., physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science). Using middle-school students' data from the Trends in International Mathematics...

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...

High school exit exams are meant to standardize the quality of public high schools and to ensure that students graduate with a set of basic skills and knowledge. Evidence suggests that a common perverse effect of exit exams is an increase in dropout for students who have difficulty passing...

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. Using our framework, we characterize the reduced-form coefficient in the peer effect literature and show that it is a...

Despite the relatively uncontested importance of promoting school attendance in the policy arena, little evidence exists on the causal effect of school absence on long-run socio-economic outcomes. We address this question by combining historical and administrative records for cohorts of Swedish...

We study the effects of increased opportunities for one-on-one time with a parent during infancy on the human capital formation of children. To this end, we exploit a nationwide reform that mandated Swedish municipalities to offer childcare access for infants' older siblings, while parents were...

Schools are ripe for policy intervention. We demonstrate that implementing different teaching practices is effective, finding a greater prevalence of group discussion used in schools positively affects students’ life satisfaction and noncognitive skills but has no impact on test scores. The...

We exploit the randomized evaluation of a remedying education intervention that improved the reading skills of low-performing third grade students in Colombia, to study whether providing educational support to low-achieving students affects the academic performance of their higher-achieving...

Quality education is a key determinant for ASEAN's aspiration to be a single market and production base and to attract foreign investment. However, the region is characterized by an education divide in terms of quality and output, and this is likely to increase in the post-COVID-19 period. A...

This paper evaluates how Vietnam's Escuela Nueva (VNEN) program, an educational reform for primary schools supported by the World Bank, affected the cognitive (mathematics and Vietnamese) and non-cognitive (socioemotional) skills of students in that country. We use propensity score matching to...

In this article we present the long-run gains of adopting a nutritious school meal program for Swedish children. During the 1960s, Sweden rolled out a universal program that provided nutritious school lunches free of charge to all children in Swedish primary schools. Our results show that the...

This study throws light on the potential non-linear effects of education on individual health and health-related behaviors, finding a strong role for higher education. Using an instrumental variables (IVs) strategy, which leverages changes in within-province between-municipality college...

This study uses a large-scale dataset from Vietnam to analyze the impacts of parental absence due to migration, death, or divorce on children's school enrollment, for children aged from 7 to 22. We find children from two-parent families have a better chance of enrolling at all levels of...

We study whether reallocating existing teachers across schools within a district can increase student achievement, and what policies would help achieve these gains. Using a model of multidimensional value-added, we find meaningful achievement gains from reallocating teachers within a district....

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. Using our framework, we characterize the reduced-form coefficient in the peer effect literature and show that it is a...

We provide first evidence of the impact of over-education, among natives and immigrants, on firm-level productivity and wages. We use Belgian linked panel data and rely on the methodology from Hellerstein et al. (1999) to estimate ORU (over-, required, and under-education) equations aggregated...

This paper investigates the relationship between financial development and income inequality by taking the role of individuals' talent into account. We measure talent using the direct observations of individuals’ achievements before entering the labor force by using the Program for...

This study throws light on the potential non-linear effects of education on individual health and health-related behaviors, finding a strong role for higher education. Using an instrumental variables (IVs) strategy, which leverages changes in within-province between-municipality college...

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students' short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where...

We study whether reallocating existing teachers across schools within a district can increase student achievement, and what policies would help achieve these gains. Using a model of multi-dimensional value-added, we find meaningful achievement gains from reallocating teachers within a district....

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 data from the 2015 China Household Financial Survey to analyse the gender gap in financial literacy in China. The sample consists of 36,311 adult respondents. A variety of financial literacy measures are employed. We show that important predictors of financial literacy include...