We examine the role of teachers and students in the formation of grade 12 test scores in public schools in Delhi. There is substantial variation in teacher and student quality within schools. Over the period spanning grades 11 and 12, being taught by a standard deviation better than average...

We use a unique firm-level data set merging administrative information on average wages paid by firms by skill level (blue collars and white collars), Population Census information on the local stock of human capital available to firms and survey information on firm characteristics to...

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian...

This paper presents a test of the educational signaling hypothesis. If employers use education as a signal in the hiring process, they will rely more on education when less is otherwise known about applicants. We find that employers are more likely to lower educational standards when an...

Is the Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) a measure of achievement or ability? The answer to this question is critical for drawing inferences from studies in which it is employed. In this paper, we test for a relationship between schooling and AFQT performance in the NLSY 79 by comparing...

We comment on the work of Hanushek et al. (2015) and show that returns to skills are very heterogeneous and depend crucially on the tasks performed in the workplace, in line with the critique by Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Depending on the type of tasks performed at work, as well as on...

Do investments in soft skills pay off in terms of student achievement? This paper evaluates a large private-sector program in this area, EPIS, based on individual and small-group sessions of mediators that seek to improve the non-cognitive skills (e.g. motivation, self-esteem, conscientiousness)...

The paper analyzes the effect of human-capital investments of heterogeneous individuals on the dynamics of the wage structure within a neoclassical growth model. The accumulation of physical capital changes relative factor prices and thus incentives to acquire skills, thereby altering the...

This paper contributes to the literature considering the wage effects of educational mismatch in Germany. It uses a large German panel data set for the period from 1984 to 1997 and stresses the importance of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity when analyzing the labor market effects of...

The theory of career mobility (Sicherman and Galor 1990) claims that wage penalties for overeducated workers are compensated by better promotion prospects. A corresponding empirical test by Sicherman (1991), using mobility to an occupation with higher human capital requirements as an indicator...