How valuable are the skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This Paper throws light on this question using unique data covering the years before and during transition (1986-98) for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners. We find that returns to a year of schooling increased by 75%...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

How does the relationship between earnings and schooling change with the introduction of comprehensive economic reform? This Paper uses a unique dataset (covering about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998) and a novel procedure to correct sample selection bias (based on DiNardo,...

Immigration is an important problem in many societies, and it has wide-ranging eects on the educational systems of host countries. There is a now a large empirical literature, but very little theoretical work on this topic. We introduce a model of family immigration in a framework where school...

In May 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centres across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of Ethiopian...

In this paper we examine the effects of the abolition of the compulsory conscription in France on the demand for education and labour market outcomes. The reform took place in 1997 and affected all men born after 1979. Before the reform, staying on in education was a way to defer the national...

There is renewed interest in ways to enhance secondary education, especially among disadvantaged students. This study evaluates the short-term effects of a remedial education programme that provided additional instruction to under-performing high school students in Israel. The programme targeted...

This Paper examines the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at the age of 16 and on wages at later stages in life. Little research exists on the effect of school quality on career decisions, although it has potentially important long-term implications. We use...

We study a model that integrates productive and socialization efforts with network choice and parental investments. We characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game. We first show that individuals underinvest in productive and social effort, but that solving only the investment...

This paper uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. To identify the causal effect of immigrant children on their native peers, the empirical...