Thurow’s job-competition model implies that overeducation is contingent upon the differing skill endowments of employees. As yet, only rudimentary evidence has been furnished to confirm this relationship. In the present paper, we test the theory in a more sophisticated manner, by means of a...

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

This paper studies the relationship between teacher unionization and student achievement. Generally stable patterns of teacher unionization since the 1970s have historically presented challenges in measuring the effects of unionization on educational production. However, the blossoming of the...

Procrastination produces harmful effects for human capital investments and studying activities. Using data from a large sample of Italian undergraduates, we measure procrastination with the actual behaviour of students, considering the delay in finalizing their university enrolment procedure. We...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality...

We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained....

One would expect that family income is an important positive factor in the school attainment of children. However, evidence on this relationship is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability, since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children. This paper...

This paper uses two large multi-country datasets on educational scores – PISA and TIMSS – to examine the performance of Russia in comparative light as well as the factors associated with differences in educational outcomes in Russia. Despite the perception of a positive educational legacy,...