Whether targeted foundational instruction yields broad, long-term human capital gains is central to education policy but largely untested. We provide causal evidence from Zambia's government-run foundational skills program in public primary schools. After two years, a randomized trial shows the...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degrees rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global...

This paper estimates the causal effect of a large language model-based study assistant on student behavior and learning outcomes in a natural field setting with real academic stakes. I design and deploy a course-specific AI assistant (GPT-UAI) for undergraduate econometrics and evaluate it...

Using two waves of nationally representative Danish firm surveys linked to employer- employee administrative registers, we study how adoption varies across artificial intelligence (AI) and related advanced technologies. We show that AI adoption is highly technologyspecific. While firm size and...

The migration activity of students as one of the important factors of changes in the intellectual potential and economic development of countries requires a constant search for the causes and pull factors. To this end, our study analyses the impact of higher education quality factors. For this...

The main purpose of this study is to assess the effect of current public expenditure on education and human capital on economic growth in Central America between 1992 and 2021. In this context, data on education spending and human capital for Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and...

We study the relative effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and interaction of family- and school-based learning interventions using a randomized controlled trial in Colombia that assigns children to a parental engagement program, a teacher professional development program, both, or a control...

Administrative strategies are essential for ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in public institutions, particularly in the context of low- and middle-income countries where governance challenges and resource constraints persist. This study analyzes the relationship between organizational...

Less or more rain, forever pain? This paper examines the long-run and intergenerational effects of early-life exposure to droughts and wet shocks on human capital outcomes over the life course. Combining a unique three-decade longitudinal survey of pregnant mothers in Metropolitan Cebu, the...

Special education serves more than one in seven U.S. students yet its causal impact remains understudied. Using longitudinal data from Massachusetts, Indiana, and Connecticut, we estimate the effect of individualized supports with an event-study design that tracks achievement around initial...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this paper exploits within-sibling differences in vocational coursework credits taken during high school to estimate their effects on educational and labor market outcomes. I find that additional vocational course-work reduces...

This paper estimates the returns to education in Arkansas - one of the last states to extend compulsory schooling - using ACS 2023 data and the 1987 Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) reform as an instrument. OLS estimates imply returns of 9.5-10.4 percent per year of schooling. The CSL reform...

We estimate the long-run effects of marginal admission to elite public high schools on students' labor supply in the context of Mexico City's centralized high school admission system. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we compare students whose placement exam scores are just above and...

Exceptional talent accounts for a disproportionate share of innovation, yet many individuals with exceptional ability may never realize their potential. Whether expanding access to advanced training generates learning gains remains an open question. We study this using a randomized controlled...

What ignited humanity's momentous ascent from millennia of stagnation to an era of sustained economic growth? And what are the roots of the vast disparities in the wealth of nations? These enduring mysteries, which have preoccupied scholars across generations, lie at the core of Unified Growth...

We develop a novel firm-level indicator of Artificial Intelligence adoption in Europe (MAP-AI) by extracting information on AI usage from more than three million firm websites from Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg (2016-2024) using a Large Language Model. The indicator captures realized...

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of...

This paper characterizes optimal education and population policies within a continuous-time overlapping generations (OLG) framework where fertility, schooling duration, and health expenditures are endogenous. In this model, mortality risk is driven by a negative congestion effect from population...

How did the US become a land of opportunity? Previous historical research on intergenerational mobility has focused on father-son income correlations, masking the role of mothers. We introduce a new mobility measure that incorporates both parents’ human capital, develop a latent variable...

We examine the long-term labor market impact of the steam engine, an early general-purpose technology, by linking newly digitized 19th-century records from Prussia to modern German labor market data (1975-2019). Regions with a higher concentration of steam engines per worker in 1875 exhibit...

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of...

This paper studies how World War I mortality shocks to British communities affected long-run innovation. Linking parish-level military deaths to universal patent data (1895-1979) and inventor records, we compare high- and low-mortality areas. A 10 percent increase in deaths reduces the...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly characterized as a General Purpose Technology (GPT) capable of reconfiguring work, accelerating digitalization, and raising aggregate productivity. Yet the pace and inclusiveness of AI adoption depend less on technical potential than on complementary...

I study how delayed retirements reshape firms internal labor markets, leveraging a German reform that raised womens early retirement age by at least three years. The reform increased retention of older women and reduced both internal promotions and external hiring of younger coworkers, with the...

This study examines how parenting styles predict children's lifetime outcomes. Using a Swedish dataset which combines rich survey information on parenting styles with administrative records tracking children over five decades, we find that authoritarian parenting is negatively associated with...

This study examines how parenting styles predict children’s lifetime outcomes. Using a Swedish dataset which combines rich survey information on parenting styles with administrative records tracking children over five decades, we find that authoritarian parenting is negatively associated with...

We examine how shocks to migration opportunities affect schooling outcomes in origin communities. We focus on the migration between Mexico and the United States, and exploit the expansion of the Secure Communities program in the US - a federal datasharing program that substantially increased the...

This study examines how parenting styles predict children's lifetime outcomes. Using a Swedish dataset which combines rich survey information on parenting styles with administrative records tracking children over five decades, we find that authoritarian parenting is negatively associated with...

The educational distribution of U.S. immigrants shifted significantly to the right in recent decades as the share without a high school diploma fell and the share with a bachelor's degree rose. This improvement coincided with a shift in immigrants' origins toward Asia and rising global education...

The literature on intergenerational mobility for many countries in the world focus on household surveys that capture the education of parents and their children. While they pay particular attention to issues regarding co-residency of fathers and son, they are somewhat weaker in information on...

The role of research and development (R&D) as a main foundation of innovation, productivity improvement, and a key element for national competitive advantage in the global economy is well established. This study aims to examine the relationship between R&D investment and economic growth through...

The changing geopolitical situation in the European region has actualized the issues of further EU enlargement. As a result, the relevance of studying many aspects of the functioning economic systems of candidate countries has increased. In this context, the purpose of this article is to...

Sarah Gust führte diese Studie während ihrer Tätigkeit am ifo Institut durch. Die Studie wurde im September 2024 abgeschlossen und als Dissertation an der Volkswirtschaftlichen Fakultät der LMU München angenommen. Sie besteht aus drei eigenständigen empirischen Essays, die...