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...

Using data from 27 sub-Saharan African countries, I identify the causal effect of sibling gender on education and how it varies according to inheritance customs. Boys who inherit their father's property experience no effect of sibling gender, while boys who do not inherit experience a...

Online offerings at traditional brick-and-mortar universities have become common, though some question if online courses can adequately substitute for the in-person college experience. We explore changes in undergraduate online course enrollment at a large, public 4-year system and the impacts...

This article investigates the relationships between ethnicity, class, and prospects of educational success. For this purpose, we compared the effects of family socio-economic characteristics on children's educational attainment in four ethno-religious groups in Israel (Muslim, Christian, and...

We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is...

We characterize intergenerational social mobility in Germany using census data on the educational attainment of 526,000 children and their parents’ earnings. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university and the most important qualification...

We present evidence on the impacts of a large-scale iodine supplementation program in Tanzania on individuals' long-term economic outcomes. Exploiting the timing and location of the intervention, we document that in utero exposure to the program increased completed years of education and income...

We characterize intergenerational mobility in Germany using census data on educational attainment and parental income for 526,000 children. Our measure of educational attainment is the A-Level degree, a requirement for access to university. A 10 percentile increase in the parental income rank is...

We study the effects of increased school spending in rural American school districts by leveraging the introduction and subsequent expansion of Wisconsin's Sparsity Aid Program. We find that the program, which provides additional state funding to small and isolated school districts, increased...

We investigate the role of education in creating employment opportunities for persons with disabilities across the European Union. We use the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 2011-2019. We find that educational attainment is a major factor determining the...

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of marriage market types based on the starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with educational programs:...

There has been a recent rapid increase in immigration into Europe, specifically in the form of refugees and asylum seekers. This raises a range of social challenges and a particular focus is education and school systems. A growing body of research investigates the impact of immigrants on native...

The birth order literature emphasizes the role of parental investments in explaining why firstborns have higher human capital outcomes than their laterborn siblings. We use birth order as a proxy for investments and interact it with genetic endowments. Exploiting only within-family variation in...

Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than...

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...

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 explores the variation in intergenerational educational mobility across the Brazilian states based on univariate econometric techniques. The analysis of the national household survey (PNAD‐2014) confirms a strong variation in mobility among the 27 federative units in Brazil and...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

Various grading reforms and trends of more lenient grading have contributed to grade inflation in Sweden and other countries. Previous research shows that over-grading increases higher education enrolment, achievements and earnings, but no study has yet addressed the potential impact of grading...

Concerned about low levels of financial literacy among teens and the importance of their looming financial decisions as emerging adults, state policymakers have expanded high school personal finance graduation requirements. Did these added requirements create an additional barrier for students?...

We investigate the effects of a large-scale Norwegian reform that provided extra teachers to 166 lower secondary schools with relatively high student-teacher ratios and low average grades. We exploit these two margins using a regression discontinuity setup and find that the reform reduced the...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

Cognitive performance in late adulthood is critical for better welfare and understanding the causes of human capital depreciation in old age is increasingly crucial in aging societies. Using data from South Africa, we study how early life education affects cognition, a component of human capital...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

Students are admitted into higher education based on their past performance. This paper compares two measures of past cognitive skills: teacher and national exam scores. By using a nationwide dataset, we look at how the predictive power of teacher assessment and exam scores for selecting...

In this paper, I develop a measure of host country experience, which I call "relative time of arrival," to explore differences between first- and second-generation immigrants. This measure is finer than immigrant generation and expands on the widely used measures of years since migration and age...

We examine whether there is an inequality of opportunity to achieve higher education, partially explained by aspirations for youth age 12-15 in economically vulnerable households. Using a unique Canadian dataset (2002-2008), we find that poverty is associated with reduced university aspirations...

Occupational credentials provide an additional-and, at times, alternative-path other than traditional academic degrees for individuals to increase productivity and demonstrate their abilities and qualifications to employers. In the United States, these credentials typically take the form of...

Teachers are among the most important inputs in the education production function. One mechanism by which teachers might affect student learning is through the grading standards they set for their classrooms. However, the effects of grading standards on student outcomes are relatively...

Mit dem Umstieg auf einen Registerzensus sollen Angaben zu Bildungsstand und Bildungsbeteiligung der Gesamtbevölkerung künftig rein aus Verwaltungs- und Statistikdaten ermittelt werden. Derzeit existiert in Deutschland keine Datenbasis, die flächendeckend Bildungsinformationen zur...