Financial aid decreases the cost of acquiring additional education. By using Italian administrative and survey data on financial aid recipients and exploiting sharp discontinuities in the amount of aid received, this paper identifies the causal effect of aid generosity on college performance and...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

Understanding the factors that may produce a sustained rate of innovation is important for promoting economic development and growth. In this paper, we examine the role of human capital in firms’ innovation by using a large sample of manufacturing firms from China. We use two firm-level...

Although many U.S. state policies presume that human capital is important for state economic development, there is little research linking better education to state incomes. In a complement to international studies of income differences, we investigate the extent to which quality-adjusted...

This paper investigates Becker, Hornung and Woessmann's recent claim that education had an important causal effect on Prussian industrialization and finds it unwarranted. The econometric analysis on which this claim is based suffers from severe problems, notably the omission of relevant...

In contexts such as education and sports, skill-accumulation of individuals over time crucially depends on the amount of training they receive, which is often allocated on the basis of repeated selection. We analyze optimal selection policies in a model of endogenous skill formation where, apart...