India's TVET system, by international standards, is at a very rudimentary level of development. TVET was a relatively neglected subject in India's educational planning, at least until the beginning of 2007. However, this changed with the 11th Plan (2007012). One dimension of this change was the...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Critics of international student comparisons argue that results may be influenced by differences in the extent to which countries adequately sample their entire student populations. In this research note, we show that larger exclusion and non-response rates are related to better country average...

Decentralization of decision-making is among the most intriguing recent school reforms, in part because countries went in opposite directions over the past decade and because prior evidence is inconclusive. We suggest that autonomy may be conducive to student achievement in well-developed...

This paper considers how optimal education and tax policy depends on the risk properties of human capital. It is demonstrated that a key feature of human capital investments is whether they increase or decrease wage risk. In a benchmark model it is shown that this feature alone determines...

This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation as they relate to pension systems. It considers as overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types being...