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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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....

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 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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

The outcome of pursuing an upper or post-secondary education degree is uncertain. A student might not complete a chosen degree for a number of reasons, such as insufficient academic preparation or financial constraints. Thus, when considering whether to invest in post-secondary education,...

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...

In this paper we develop a model capturing key features of the Roy model, a search model, compensating differentials, and human capital accumulation on-the-job. We establish which features of the model can be non-parametrically identified and which cannot. We estimate the model and use it to...

The outcome of pursuing a post-secondary educational degree is uncertain. A student might not complete a chosen degree for a number of reasons, such as academic insufficiency or financial constraints. Thus, when considering whether to invest in post-secondary education, students must factor in...

Evidence for the United States suggests balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and less than unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawa.s theorem to show that introducing human capital...

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of jobs that vary in their attributes (such as earnings and job hours flexibility) and asked to state their probabilistic choices. We...

We propose a household production function approach to human development in which the role of parenting style in child rearing is explicitly considered. Specifically, we model parenting style as an investment in human development that depends not only on inputs of time and market goods, but also...