This paper synthesizes what economists have learned about human capital since Becker (1962) into four stylized facts. First, human capital explains at least one-third of the variation in labor earnings within countries and at least half of the variation across countries. Second, human capital...

There are many reasons to want measures of countries' investments in human capital and especially their investments in formal education. We review the existing literature on the measurement of human capital. Broadly speaking, economists have proposed three approaches to the measurement of human...

This paper estimates the heterogeneous labor market effects of enrolling in higher education short-cycle (SC) programs. Expanding access to these programs might affect the behavior of some students (compliers) in two margins: the expansion margin (students who would not have enrolled in higher...

In the three decades before the pandemic, mean achievement of U.S. 8th graders in math rose by more than half a standard deviation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. students had forfeited 40 percent of that rise. To anticipate the consequences...

This paper discusses the importance of incorporating personal assistance into interventions aimed at improving long-term education and labor market success. While existing research demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of low-touch behavioral nudges, this paper argues that the dynamic nature of...

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...

We examine the effect of attending stand-alone technical high schools on the industry of employment and within industry earnings premiums using a regression discontinuity design. We study the universe of students that applied to the Connecticut Technical Education and Career System (CTECS)...

In theory, unilateral divorce laws alter the private incentive to invest in human capital by permitting either spouse to initiate the division of the marital assets. Using several causal research designs we show that both men and women are less likely to attain a bachelor's degree in states with...

Amidst the rise of remote work, we ask: what are the effects of proximity to coworkers? We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output. We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, whose main campus has...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...