Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

We estimate the relationship between computers and students' educational achievement in the international student-level PISA database. Bivariate analyses show a positive correlation between achievement and computer availability both at home and at school. However, once we control extensively for...

This paper develops empirical growth models suitable for dual economies, and studies the relationship between structural change and economic growth. Changes in the structure of employment will raise aggregate productivity when the marginal product of labour varies across sectors. The models in...

Dieser Artikel präsentiert Ergebnisse mehrerer international vergleichender und deutscher mikroökonometrischer Untersuchungen zum Zusammenhang zwischen frühkindlicher Bildung und späteren kognitiven und nicht-kognitiven Fähigkeiten anhand der TIMSS-, PISA-, IGLU- und...

Even though some countries track students into differing-ability schools by age 10, others keep their entire secondary-school system comprehensive. To estimate the effects of such institutional differences in the face of country heterogeneity, we employ an international...

Patience and risk-taking - two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making - are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find...