Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we...

Several recent studies based on 'exogenous' sources of variation in education outcomes show Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates of returns to schooling that are substantially higher than the corresponding Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates. Card (1995a) suggests that these results can be...

This Paper examines the education literature through the lens of sorting. It argues that how individuals sort across neighborhoods, schools and households (spouses), can have important consequences for the acquisition of human capital and inequality. It discusses the implications of different...

This Paper examines the interactions between household matching, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide whether to become skilled or unskilled, form households, consume and have children. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their...

There is a considerable empirical literature which compares wage levels of workers who have studied at secondary vocational schools with wages of workers who took academic schooling. In general, vocational education does not lead to higher wages. In some countries where labour markets are...

An important component of the long-run cost of a war is the loss of human capital, suffered by children of schooling age who receive less education because of the war. This paper shows that in the European countries involved in World War II, children who were ten years old during the conflict...

Using data for the 1990s, this Paper examines the role of sheepskin effects in the returns to education for Japan. Our estimations indicate that sheepskin effects explain about 50% of the total returns to schooling. We further find that sheepskin effects are only important for workers in small...

This study explains the evolution of wage inequality over the last 30 years and supports this explanation with evidence. At each level of schooling, a faster rate of technological progress weakens the link between schooling and work and increases the unknown needed to cope with during one's...

We use a new sample of UK female identical twins to estimate private economic returns to education. We report findings in three areas. First, we use identical twins, to control for family effects and genetic ability bias, and the education reported by the other twin to control for schooling...