This paper focuses on instrument choice while consistently estimating the returns to education in Vietnam. Using data culled from the 2 rounds of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey (VLSS), we explore different sets of exogenous instruments that rely on demand and supply side sources of...

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 paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...

This paper analyses the effect of school quality on early career earnings. Using confidential district level information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), it is demonstrated that class size has no discernible effect on early career earnings. This finding is robust to changes in...

We estimate the demand for colleges in the United States by relating new applications to easily comparable characteristics of the schools in the sample. We find that the demand for 1134 U.S. colleges in 1994 is positively related to out-of-state tuition but inversely related to in- state...

The notion that lack of knowledge undermines the economic performance of African countries is deeply and widely held to be true. Yet evidence for the basis of that truth is few and far in-between. This paper first describes a production function approach to the creation of knowledge of African...

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...

Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, despite little evidence that teachers' credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers' characteristics-both observable and unobservable-it is essential to identify...