Economists have a poor understanding of the mechanisms underlying reduced-form college peer effects. In this paper we explore a candidate mechanism, the provision of school effort. We show that, when earnings reflect individual educational performance as well as the field of study selected at...

According to the standard principal-agent model, the optimal composition of pay should balance the provision of incentives with the individual demand for insurance. Do income taxes alter this balance? We show that the relative share of PRP on total pay is reduced by higher average taxes, and is...

Several commentators have argued that vocational education provides a smoother school to work transition than academic education. In the long - run, however, the skills it provides depreciate faster and individuals with this type of education are less capable of adapting to technical change....

The reduction of early school leaving to less than 10 percent of the relevant population by 2020 is a headline target in the Europe 2020 strategy and one of the five benchmarks of the strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training. Designing adequate policies to combat...

Pension reforms that raise minimum retirement age increase the pool of senior individuals aged 50+ who are not eligible to retire from the labour market. Using data from Italian provinces and regions and an instrumental variable strategy, we estimate the effects of local changes in the supply of...

Using matched employer-employee data for Italy and newly available information on sick leaves certificates, we study the effect of an exogenous increase in the length of the residual work horizon - triggered by a pension reform that increased minimum retirement age - on middle-aged employees'...

We use data from three waves of Add Health to study the short- and long-run effects of high school peers' genetic predisposition to high BMI - measured by grade-mates' average BMI polygenic scores - on adolescent and adult obesity in the U.S. We find that, in the short-run, a one standard...

We use Danish register data to investigate whether the effects of schoolmates' gender and average parental education on individual educational achievement, employment and earnings vary with individual family characteristics such as the gender of siblings and own parental education. We find that...