In this study, I estimate the impact of offering two large non-refundable grants to low-income Canadian youth on postsecondary attendance. The grants had two interesting features. First, they were clawed back from loans, thus reducing costs but providing no additional liquidity. Second, the...

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...

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth cohorts(NLSY79 and NLSY97) to estimate changes in the effects of ability and family income on educational attainment for youth in their late teens during the early 1980s and early 2000s. Cognitive ability plays an...

Tight labour markets driven by resource booms could increase the opportunity cost of schooling and crowd out human capital formation. For oil producing economies like the Province of Alberta, the OPEC oil shocks of 1973 to 1981 may have had an adverse long term effect on the productivity of the...

We use a unique set of linked administrative data sets to explore the determinants of persistence and academic success in university. The explanatory power of high school grades greatly dominates that of other variables such as university program, gender, and neighbourhood and high school...

Teacher strikes can have many of effects, including creating major inconveniences for parents, but the most contentious issue is undoubtedly the impact on student learning. The argument against teachers’ right to strike is based on the assumption that teacher strikes negatively affect...

Many wonder whether teacher gender plays an important role in higher education by influencing student achievement and subject interest. The data used in this paper helps identify average effects from male and female university students assigned to male or female teachers. In contrast to previous...

This paper extends our understanding of the difference in university participation between students with and without immigrant backgrounds by contrasting outcomes in Switzerland and Canada, and by the use of new longitudinal data that are comparable between the countries. The research includes...

In North America, students with immigrant parents typically achieve higher levels of education than their counterparts with domestic-born parents. In Europe however, the opposite is typically true. In Canada, immigrants students (1st or 2nd generation) are 1.6 times as likely to attend...

Recent development of adult learning typologies stems from the policy community’s interest in collecting information on learning activities of populations in order to understand the economic and social benefits of learning and to contribute to the development of evidence-informed policy...