Analyzing university faculty and graduate students data for ten of the top U.S. economics departments between 1987 and 2007, we find persistent differences in the gender compositions of both faculty and graduate students across departments. There is a positive correlation between the share of...

Prior research on the labor market success of secondary vocational education has produced mixed results, with several studies finding wage gains only for individuals who work in training-related occupations. We contribute to this debate by focusing on a single occupation and organization and by...

Is it possible to compress instruction time into fewer school years without lowering education levels? A fundamental reform in Germany reduced the length of academic track schooling by one year, while increasing instruction hours in the remaining school years to provide students with a very...

Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented in universities. In this regard, the economics literature has focused on the role of financial constraints as a cause of these observed differences in...

Despite numerous studies on skill development, we know little about the effects of extracurricular music activities on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. This study examines how music training during childhood and youth affects the development of cognitive skills, school grades, personality,...

Many state governments impose tuition regulations on public colleges in pursuit of college affordability. How effective are these regulations? We use a modified event study design to study how colleges' ``sticker price'' and institutional financial aid change during and after tuition caps and...

In elementary school, girls typically outperform boys in languages and boys typically outperform girls in math. The determinants of these differences have remained largely unexplored. Using rich data from Dutch elementary schools, we decompose the differences in achievement into gender...

We exploit presumably exogenous variation in the availability of college-educated workers at the province level produced by a reform that increased the supply of higher education to estimate human capital production externalities for Italian manufacturing firms. We show that when the potential...