Despite extensive literature on peer effects, the role of peers on personality skill development remains poorly understood. We fill this gap by investigating the effects of having disadvantaged primary school peers, generated by random classroom assignment and parental migration for employment....

This study examines the impact that over-education has on the earnings of private and public sector workers in Trinidad and Tobago. Using individual person's data from the Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) for the period 1991-2015, the returns of over-educated workers is...

This paper studies the occupational selection among generations of immigrants in the United States and links their choices to the occupational wage distribution in their country of origin. The empirical results suggest that individuals are more likely to take up an occupation in the US that was...

This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

Misallocation of human capital across sectors can have substantial negative implications for aggregate output. So far, the literature examining this type of labor misallocation has assumed a Cobb-Douglas production function. Our paper departs from this assumption and instead considers more...

This paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...

Even the most egalitarian education systems employ high-stakes tests to regulate the transition from universal secondary education to selective academic programs that open doors to skilled, well-paid professions. This gives parents a strong incentive to invest substantial resources in improving...

This paper examines the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the returns to education in the United States. Using data from the Current Population Survey 2011-2022, the analysis reveals that, after a period of decline, returns to education increased significantly because of COVID, particularly...

In this paper we use a large official employer-employee dataset, which includes almost the whole universe of business firms, to document and decompose the rising graduates postgraduates' wage differentials in Portugal. Using a non-parametric matching exercise, we pay particular attention to...