This paper estimates the effects of family-background characteristics on student performance in the US and 17 Western European school systems. Family background has strong effects both in Europe and the United States, remarkably similar in size. France and Flemish Belgium achieve the most...

We examine earnings records for 90,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 20,000 of whom left teaching during that time. Among grade 4-8 teachers leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated...

This paper presents the first analysis of the effect of teacher collective bargaining on long-run labor market and educational attainment outcomes. Our analysis exploits the different timing across states in the passage of duty-to-bargain laws in a difference-in-difference framework to identify...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to highlight the role of human capital accumulation of agents differentiated by skill type in the joint determination of social mobility and the skill premium. We first show that our model captures the empirical co-movement of the skill...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing information to principals about teacher...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

We investigate the role of firms in intergenerational mobility by decomposing the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE) into firm-IGE and individual-IGE using a two-way fixed effects framework. Using data from Israel, we find that the firm component is responsible for 22% of the overall...

Although women earn approximately 50 percent of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor's degrees, more than 70 percent of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of...

Using an originally constructed dataset that follows 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to the labor market, we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We exploit the...