Curriculum tracking creates incentives in the years before its start, and we should therefore expect test scores to be higher during those years. I find robust evidence for incentive effects of tracking in the UK based on the UK comprehensive school reform. Results from the Swedish comprehensive...

This paper examines long-term changes in the persistence of overeducation among individual workers, focusing on the relationship between the rate of those changes and the general economic situation. All analyses are based on data from the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) conducted throughout the...

This paper analyses occupational matching of immigrants from over seventy countries of origin to 22 European countries. Using European Social Survey for the years 2002–2009, we show that immigrants are more likely to be both under- and overeducated than the native born for the jobs that they...

This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional ‘school-to-work’ stage of the life-course. We operationalise such ‘lifelong learning’ as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period...

Panel data on MBA graduates is used in an attempt to empirically distinguish between human capital and signaling models of education. The existence of employment observations prior to MBA enrollment allows for the control of unobserved ability or selection into MBA programs (through the use of...

Two-year colleges are an important part of the higher education system in the United States but there are concerns as to how attendance at these institutions affects educational attainment and labor market outcomes. This paper uses data from a nationally representative survey to examine the...

We analyse a rich dataset of Economics students at a UK university to identify causal effects of class absence on student performance, exploiting the random assignment of students and information on students’ class timetables to avoid selection problems. We use panel properties of the data to...

In this paper, I study ability peer effects among teenagers. The identification relies on a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach where assignment into high-ability classes constitutes the source of identifying information. An important feature of this system is that both types of classes are...

Using data from a randomized experiment and fixed effect quantile regression (FEQR), we examine the effects of having a TFA teacher on test scores across the entire achievement distribution of primary school students in disadvantaged neighborhoods. While we generally find that TFA teachers...

Investment in human capital is an important tool for reducing poverty. However, the poor may lack the capacity to aspire, which often results in underinvestment in their children's education. This paper studies the effect of a social program on the educational aspirations poor parents have for...