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...

This study examines the influence of social capital, intellectual capital, resource rents, and investment capital on the economic performance of the 18 member states of the European Union from 2005 to 2022. Principal component analysis and factor analysis are employed to construct composite...

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...

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 technology-specific. While firm size and...

This article involves studying the formation of the identity of technological entrepreneurs as a part of the development of human potential in a high-tech environment, which today is in high demand not only among entrepreneurs and startup founders but also among managers and highly qualified...

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...

The Government of Papua New Guinea has ambitious goals: to grow the economy to K200 billion by 2030, create one million jobs, and achieve a balanced budget by 2027. Meaningful progress has been made, with sustained fiscal consolidation significantly reducing the fiscal deficit from its COVID-era...

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...

We examine whether restricting temporary contracts increases firms' investment in worker training, exploiting Spain's 2022 labour market reform. Using 3.1 million online job postings from 2018 to 2024, we implement a difference-in-differences design that leverages pre-reform variation in...

We examine whether restricting temporary contracts increases firms' investment in worker training, exploiting Spain's 2022 labour market reform. Using 3.1 million online job postings from 2018 to 2024, we implement a difference-in-differences design that leverages prereform variation in reliance...

We use population-level administrative data covering secondary school students in England to study how mathematical and verbal skills shape education and labour market outcomes. Following cohorts completing national exams at age 16 through higher education and into employment until age 34, we...

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...

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...

The HCI+ measures how effectively a country builds human capital, tracking the likelihood that children today will grow into healthy, educated, and productive adults. It integrates measures from three dimensions of human capital—health, education, and employment—into one index using...

The World Bank launched the Human Capital Index (HCI) to highlight the importance of investments in human capital and to benchmark key components of human capital across countries. This HCI is an international metric that measures the amount of human capital a child born today can be expected to...

This paper provides the first comprehensive, cross-country evidence on the wage returns to digital skills, using more than 67 million job postings from 29 countries between 2021 and 2024. The paper develops a harmonized digital skills taxonomy and examines returns across extensive (any digital...

Human capital—the health, knowledge, skills, and experience that people accumulate throughout their lives—is essential for productivity and economic growth. Yet, progress has stalled, and there have even been reversals in human capital accumulation over the last 15 years. Two-thirds of low-...

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...

While rent-sharing is known to vary according to worker characteristics, the impact of profits on the gender wage gap warrants closer examination. Most studies adopt a single-gender view, neglecting factors tied to bargaining power. Our paper aims to fill this gap by leveraging rich matched...

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...

China's One-Child Policy (OCP) restricted most couples to a single birth, leading to a rapid increase in the prevalence of only children. Using longitudinal data and a regression discontinuity design around the policy's start, we estimate the effects on grandchildren's human capital. We find...

While rent-sharing is known to vary according to worker characteristics, the impact of profits on the gender wage gap warrants closer examination. Most studies adopt a single-gender view, neglecting factors tied to bargaining power. Our paper aims to fill this gap by leveraging rich matched...

Accumulated entrepreneurial experience, as a form of human capital, plays a critical role in shaping current venture revenue. Building on insights from entrepreneurship and human capital theory, the study establishes a causal inverted U-shaped relationship between prior entrepreneurial...

This study examines the long-term impact of childhood exposure to Glacier Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) on adult human capital outcomes in the High Mountain Asia (HMA) region. Using historical GLOF data and geospatial mapping of downstream flood pathways, we identify treatment and control groups...

This study investigates the impact of inflation on human capital investment decisions. Using a specially designed survey we estimate the causal effect of recent price level increases on the graduation plans of over 1,200 U.S. university students. We find that inflation caused over half of the...

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...