Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates....

Using a dataset covering over 10,000 Australian primary school teachers and over 90,000 pupils, I estimate how effective teachers are in raising students’ test scores from one exam to the next. Since the exams are conducted only every two years, it is necessary to take account of the...

This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not...

It is well known that higher education financing involves uncertainty and risk with respect to students’ future economic fortunes, and an unwillingness of banks to provide loans because of the absence of collateral. It follows that without government intervention there will be both socially...

This paper reviews the origins of the 2 per percent rule, arguing that existing evidence for the rule is not as strong as is often supposed and that in any case it can be a misleading guide to the payoff period in policy applications. In the context of a postulated change in the rate of increase...

This paper considers educational investment, wages and hours of market work in an imperfectly competitive labour market with heterogeneous workers and home production. It investigates the degree to which there might be both underemployment in the labour market and underinvestment in education. A...

The question of whether giving birth as a teenager has negative economic consequences for the mother remains controversial despite substantial research. In this paper, we build upon existing literature, especially the literature that uses the experience of teenagers who had a miscarriage as the...

In this paper we highlight the relevance of work-related training to the minimum wage debate. We initially situate training incidence within the broader picture of the earnings distribution in Britain and demonstrate that lower-paid workers are less likely than workers towards the top of the...

We use new training data from waves 3-6 of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to investigate the training and wages of full-time men. We explore the extent to which the data are consistent with the predictions of human capital theory or with recent alternative theories...