In this paper we develop a structural model for job search behavior of students entering the labor market. The model includes endogenous search effort and on-the-job search. Since students usually do not start a regular job before graduation but start job search earlier, our model is non...

To study the long-term effects of school-starting-age rules in a setting with early ability tracking, we exploit the birth month threshold used in the Netherlands. We find that students born just after the threshold perform better at the end of primary school than students born just before it....

This paper uses administrative data from 16 cohorts of the Dutch population to study the relationship between field of study and family outcomes. We first document considerable variation by field of study for a range of family outcomes. To get to causal effects, we use admission lotteries that...

This paper investigates the impact of parental education on child health outcomes. To identify the causal effect we explore exogenous variation in parental education induced by a schooling reform in 1947, which raised the minimum school leaving age in the UK. Findings based on data from the...

We exploit admission lotteries to estimate the payoffs to the dentistry study in the Netherlands. Using data from up to 22 years after the lottery, we find that in most years after graduation dentists earn around 50,000 Euros more than they would earn in their next-best profession. The payoff is...

This paper formulates a simple skill and education model to explain how better access to higher education leads to stronger assortative mating on skills of parents and more polarized skill and earnings distributions of children. Swedish data show that in the second half of the 20th century more...