Mentoring programs can strongly improve the transition from school to work for disadvantaged adolescents. Results from our field experiment indicate that a German mentoring program markedly boosts school achievement, patience, and labor-market orientation of students from highly disadvantaged...

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that...

Improvement in human capital is often presumed important for state economic development, but little research links better education to state incomes. We develop detailed measures of worker skills in each state that incorporate cognitive skills from state- and country-of-origin achievement tests....