This review describes the research frontier on human capital and education in economics research. It delineates what is known and largely agreed, and what are the most promising lines for future research. The approach will be to explain clearly and precisely the research evidence, in a way that...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

We use unique administrative German data to examine the role of childhood health for the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Specifically, we examine the extent to which a comprehensive list of health conditions - diagnosed by government physicians - can account for developmental...

Empirical studies in the economics of education, the measurement of skill gaps across demographic groups, and the impacts of interventions on skill formation rely on psychometrically validated test scores that record the proportion of items correctly answered. Test scores are sometimes taken as...

This paper revisits the question of how brain drain affects the optimal education policy of a developing economy. Our framework of analysis highlights the complementarity between public spending on education and students' efforts to acquire human capital in response to career opportunities at...

Trends in skill bias and greater turbulence in modern labor markets put wages and employment prospects of unskilled workers under pressure. Weak incentives to utilize and maintain skills over the life-cycle become manifest with the ageing of the population. Reinvention of human capital policies...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...

This paper estimates the longer-term effects of childhood conduct disorder on human capital accumulation and violent and criminal behaviour later in life using data of Australian twins. We measure conduct disorder with a rich set of indicators based on diagnostic criteria from psychiatry. Using...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT) are programs under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks. While there is significant evidence showing that they have positive impacts on school participation, little is known about their...