East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

We analyze the impact of family-friendly policies on women?s career breaks due to childbirth in Denmark and Sweden. In both countries, the labour force attachment of mothers is high, and more than 90% of the women return to work after childbirth. Sweden and Denmark are culturally similar and...

This paper analyzes how the implicit difference in time horizons between refugees and economic immigrants affects subsequent human capital investments and wage assimilation. The analysis uses the 1980/1990 Integrated Public Use Samples of the Census to study labor market outcomes of immigrants...

This study compares wage mobility in Portugal and the UK, replicating the work by Dickens (2000) and progressing to discuss the impact of differences in the institutional framework, which is more regulated and centralized in Portugal, with minimum wages, employment protection, and collective...

In this paper we analyse with the PISA data on literacy achievement of fifteen-year-old pupils in six member countries of the OECD, whether the fact of having many siblings affects the individual educational outcome. The hypothesis that we test is whether parents? resources matter for...

It is well known that children reared in non-intact families on average have less favorable educational outcomes than children reared in two-parent families. Evidence from the United States and Sweden indicates that living in a non-intact family is correlated with lower educational attainment....

We use the PISA student-level achievement database to estimate international education production functions. Student characteristics, family backgrounds, home inputs, resources, teachers and institutions are all significantly related to math, science and reading achievement. Our models account...

This study provides the first set of estimates of the returns to schooling over an extended period in Russia and Ukraine (1985-2002). There has been an increase in returns to schooling in both countries but the increase is much bigger in Russia than in Ukraine. The intriguing question is why...

This paper considers the allocation of labour on the French and British markets, using objective wage and subjective satisfaction data. We show that, in some sectors, workers enjoy both higher wages and higher job satisfaction. We argue that this reflects labour market wage rents. Perhaps...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...