The view that the returns to public educational investments are highest for early childhood interventions stems primarily from several influential randomized trials - Abecedarian, Perry, and the Early Training Project - that point to super-normal returns to preschool interventions. This paper...

Using the NLSY data set, this paper formulates and then empirically estimates the production processes for social, motivational and cognitive skills during early childhood development and the long-term effects of these skills on learning and life-time earnings of an individual. Using these...

This is a theoretical study of human-capital formation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

This paper investigates differences across UK universities in 1993 life sciences students' degree performance using individual-level data from the Universities' Statistical Record (USR). Differences across universities are analysed by specifying and estimating a subject- specific educational...

This paper reports about a randomized field experiment in which first year economics and business students at the University of Amsterdam could earn financial rewards for passing the first year requirements within one year. Participants were assigned to a high, low and zero (control) reward...

This study estimates the effect of expanding enrollment possibilities in early eduction on the achievement of young children. To do so it exploits two features of the Dutch schooling system. First, children are allowed to enroll in school on their fourth birthday. Second, children having their...

This paper describes a new method for assigning letter grades to students based on their raw scores, which I call Multi-Curve Grading (MCG). The intuition behind the method is that a class can be composed of several different subgroups, each of which should be assigned a different grade. In...

Previous studies about the academic publishing process consider the publication delay as starting from the submission to the publishing journal. This ignores the potential delay caused by rejections received from previous journals. Knowing how many times papers are submitted prior to publication...

A woman may choose to become more educated, partly because she wishes to emulate those around her. A behavioral model suggests that she is less likely to lose her baby than the less educated by flouting basic rules of health. Estimates of a three-equation model suggest that low-weight births are...

The paper is purported to analyze the impact of skill formation on the skilled-unskilled wage inequality using a few variants of the HOS-type framework. It shows that the effect of skill formation on the wage inequality depends crucially upon the technologies of production of the economy and...