Using the recently released UK Household Longitudinal Study we examine whether the raising of the school leaving age in 1972 had a permanent impact on earnings for individuals in their early 50s.

Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection.

The incentive effect of a handicap in a tournament competition is studied. A handicap may decrease the effort levels of the advantaged group or the disadvantaged group. However, the average effort level will always increase as long as the performance measure is informative of effort in a...

Experimental studies have compared cooperation across different nonmarket social dilemma settings, but the experimental literature has largely overlooked comparing cooperation across market and nonmarket settings. This paper reports the results from an experiment that compares behavior in...

Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011) show that some naive participants may be better off under the Boston mechanism than under deferred acceptance. Here we show that under the veil of ignorance all naive students may prefer the Boston mechanism.

We exploit within-school variation in counselors and find that one additional counselor reduces student misbehavior and increases boys’ academic achievement by over one percentile point. These effects compare favorably with those of increased teacher quality and smaller class sizes.

This study introduces a piecewise-linear relationship between student achievement and class size. Using student-level data from Japan, we find that piecewise-linear specifications clearly show a better fit to the data. We also find that a significant class-size effect is observed in the lower...

The standard approach to the estimation of schooling returns disregards earnings persistence. Using longitudinal data for Belgian male workers (ECHP, 1994–2001), we show that earnings persistence matters.

We analyze the determinants of reading literacy, mathematical skills and science skills of young immigrant children in The Netherlands. We find that these are affected by age at immigration and whether or not one of the parents is native Dutch.

This paper studies the effects of educational borrowing constraints on economic growth and welfare. We consider a three-period-lived overlapping generations model in which individuals finance their educational expenditures by borrowing. We show that if the elasticity of human capital to...