Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governmentsÕ ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

Many countries use centralized exit exams as a governance devise of the school system. While abundant evidence suggests positive effects of central exams on achievement tests, previous research on university-bound students shows no effects on subsequent earnings. We suggest that labor-market...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Height has long been recognized as being associated with better outcomes: the question is whether this association is causal. We use children's genetic variants as instrumental variables to deal with possible unobserved confounders and examine the effect of child/adolescent height on a wide...

This paper reconsiders Persson and Tabellini's (2003, 2004) analysis of the causal effect of constitution type on government size. It addresses the concerns of Acemoglu (2005) and makes some measurement and methodological refinements to the identification strategy to argue there is a...