The paper examines UK PhD completion and withdrawal rates, in a competing risks framework, using the 1986 National Survey of 1980 Graduates. The statistical problem of thresholding of completion data is also addressed. We argue that our results suggest that there are problems with the use of PhD...

Empirical evidence suggests that parents with higher levels of education generally also attach a higher importance to the education of their children. This implies an intergenerational chain transmitting the attitude towards the formation of human capital from one generation to the next. We...

The analysis uses a unique set of data matching mothers and their young adult children to study the impact of family background on young people’s educational attainments. The data is derived from the first five years (1991–5) of the British Household Panel Study. Mother’s education is...

We propose a new test for the presence of job-market signalling in the sense of Spence (1973), based on an equation in which log-wages are explained by two endogenous variables: the student's degree and the student's time to degree, not simply by years of education. Log-wages are regressed on a...

Improving the quality of instruction is a central component to virtually all proposals to raise school quality. Unfortunately, policy recommendations often ignore existing evidence about teacher labor markets and the determinants of teacher effectiveness in the classroom. This chapter reviews...

Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study, (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. The thousands of studies that have applied human capital theory to the first two...

This chapter deals with several salient issues about immigrants to the US and their education. These issues include a comparison of the schooling accomplishments of immigrants compared to the native-born both contemporaneously as well as over time. These comparisons emphasize the considerable...

In recent decades, there has been rising anxiety about the quality of the public education in the United States. However, it is important to note that this has not always been the case; in fact, the United States has long been a leader in terms of the public provision of education at all levels...

The survey presents basic facts on wage growth and summarizes the main ideas on the possible sources of this growth. We document that wage growth happens mainly early in the life cycle and is then associated with increasing labor force participation and high job mobility. Wage growth during the...

Any system of primary and secondary schools involves explicit or implicit mechanisms that ration not only financial but also nonfinancial inputs into education production. This chapter focuses primarily on such mechanisms as they relate to the sorting of parents and children into schools and...