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...

In the last decades, the majority of OECD countries has experienced a continuous increase in public debt. The European debt crisis has prompted a fundamental re‐evaluation of public debt sustainability and the looming threat of sovereign debt default. Due to a multitude of large scale events...

This paper provides new evidence on the sustainability of public finances in German states (Laender) by exploiting a newly compiled database covering the years 1950‐2011. Unlike previous studies on Germany, we analyze fiscal sustainability by applying “second generation” panel...

International differences in teacher quality are commonly hypothesized to be a key determinant of the large international student performance gaps, but lack of consistent quality measures has precluded testing this. Using unique assessment data, we construct country-level measures of teacher...

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...