We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement.  The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England.  Our data enable a...

This paper looks at the impact of education on household economic welfare in Sri Lanka over twenty years from 1985 to 2006 using five cross section household survey datasets.  Applying quantile regression techniques the analysis finds that the incremental value to household welfare shows a...

This paper provides an overview of school education in India. Firstly, it places India`s educational achievements in international perspective, especially against countries with which it is now increasingly compared such as BRIC economies in general and China in particular. India does well...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long-run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. We study a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19...

This paper documents the regional divide in educational facilities between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan between 1947 and 1971. During this period, the total number of primary schools in East Pakistan declined, leading to overcrowding of existing schools and classrooms. On the...

While it might be expected that schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is...

This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Econometric analyses of European datasets suggest that income aspirations increase with current income.  This finding is consistent with the adaptation hypothesis - the notion that individual aspirations adjust to reflect personal circumstances and living conditions.  We add to these existing...

This study employs the pseudo-panel approach to estimate returns to education among income earners in Sri Lanka.  Pseudo-panel data are constructed from nine repreated cross-sections of Sri Lanka’s Labor Force Survey data from 1997-2008 for workers born during 1953-1974.  The results...