It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market However it not clear whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the worker...

In my contribution to this Symposium I wish to explore two main themes. The first deals with the contribution of education to economic growth at the macro level. In this part I shall discuss the evidence of the importance of education – or human capital formation – as a determinant of the...

A vast body of research finds an association between missteps taken during the teen years (such as motherhood or dropping out of high school) and poor economic and educational outcomes. However, youth who take major missteps as teens often have subsequent success in school or the labor market....

In this article, I evaluate the hypothesis that firms respond to negative demand shocks by assigning workers to tasks that require less skill than the tasks they normally carry out. Using changes in employment in state-industry cells as a measure of demand conditions facing individual firms, I...

This research is concerned with the skills-match between researchers' Ph.D. training and their subsequent university employment. Self-rated skills-matching is considered in light of the anchoring vignettes technique. This technique is used to adress comparability issues in survey research. It...

This paper first explores the history of famine in England as a window on living standards in the medieval and pre-industrial eras. It then considers nutrition levels and human capital endowments in England in the eve of the Industrial Revolution.