Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals...

Providing equal opportunities to all members of society independent of an individual's socioeconomic background is a major objective of German policy makers. However, evidence on the access to education suggests that opportunities of children with a non-academic family background are still...

This paper uses two sets of cross-country micro datasets to analyse individuals’ participation in voluntary and community activities and organisations. Analysing countries in the International Adult Literacy Survey and focusing on the impact of human capital I find a consistently positive...

Whether elite universities expand or limit upward mobility in the long run depends on how they shape the intergenerational transmission of educational and social outcomes. We combine five decades of linked data on social and educational trajectories for parents and children in Chile with a...

We analyze the impact of adolescents' friendship relations in their final-year class of highschool on subsequent labor market success. Based on a typology of network positions we locateeach student within the social system of the school class as either: an isolate, a sycophant,a broker or a...

This paper incorporates job search through personal contacts into an equilibrium matching model with a segregated labour market. Job search in the public submarket is competitive which is in contrast with the bargaining nature of wages in the informal job market. Moreover, the social capital of...