The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data from the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis to analyze to what degree violations of the strict validity assumption affect the...

College students are taking longer to earn baccalaureate degrees now than ever before, but little is known about institutional factors that may contribute to this trend. In this paper we investigate an important institutional constraint—course scarcity—that we hypothesize may be associated...

The debate over private versus public provision of schooling remains contentious. A large literature has developed focusing on the relative educational performance of different school types. Beyond these important outcomes, variations in schooling may have direct effects on students’...

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard in estimating treatment effects. When an RCT is infeasible, regression modeling or statistical matching are often used instead. Nonexperimental methods such as these could produce unbiased estimates if the underlying...

Despite the rapid expansion and increasing importance of private education in developing countries, little is known on the impact of studying in private schools on education and wages. This paper contributes to filling this gap by estimating the returns to private high schools in Mexico. We...

In this paper we provide new evidence on the causal effect of education on adult depression and cognition. We use SHARE data and schooling reforms in several European countries as instruments for educational attainment. We find that an extra year of education has a large and significant...

The non-resident student market brings monetary resources to colleges and universities in the U.S. Previous research on price-setting has been predominantly limited to public institutions. This study offers geospatial indicators to capture local competition and influence from public and private...

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...