We study the relationship between age and literacy skills in Canada, Norway and the U.S. – countries that represent a wide range of literacy outcomes -- using data from the 1994 and 2003 International Adult Literacy Surveys. In cross-sectional data there is a weak negative partial...

Literacy is central to the improvement and betterment of any society. Individuals cannot fully engage in social and political discourse, and are more likely to become less-than-equals in society without basic literacy to pursue their goals. On the individual level, more literate individuals tend...

L’alphabétisme est capital pour l’amélioration de toute société. Tout un chacun ne peut participer entièrement au discours social et politique, et aura sans doute une position inférieure en société, s’il ne possède pas l’alphabétisme de base lui permettant d’atteindre ses...

This paper uses detailed administrative data from one of the largest community colleges in the United States to quantify the extent to which academic performance depends on students being of similar race or ethnicity to their instructors. To address the concern of endogenous sorting, we use both...

We provide the first empirical application of a new approach proposed by Lee (2007) to estimate peer effects in a linear-in-means model. The approach allows to control for group-level unobservables and to solve the reflection problem, without imposing ad hoc exclusion restrictions or requiring...

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The paper analyzes three possible general methods to measure the price and quantity of nonmarket government...

In many sectors of the economy, governments either provide various services at no cost or at highly subsidized prices. Examples are the health, education and general government sectors. The System of National Accounts 1993 recommends valuing these nonmarket outputs at their costs of production...

There has been growing interest in using specific genetic markers as instrumental variables in attempts to assess causal relationships between health status and socioeconomic outcomes, including human capital accumulation. In this paper we use a combination of family fixed effects and genetic...

Using U.S. and Canadian census data I exploit the massive out migration of approximately 1 million French-Canadians who moved mainly to New England between 1865 and 1930 to look at how the educational attainment and enrollment patterns of their descendants compare with those of same aged...

The province of Ontario has two publicly funded school systems: secular schools (known as public schools) that are open to all students, and separate schools that are limited to children with Catholic backgrounds. A simple model of inter-system competition predicts that incentives for effort are...