This study investigates the relationship between university quality and graduate starting salaries using pooled Australian data from the Graduate Destination survey and a two-stage estimation methodology. The results suggest that average starting salaries for young undergraduates differ...

We study the relationship between age and literacy skills in Canada, Norway and the U.S. – countries that represent a wide range of literacy outcomes – using data from the 1994 and 2003 International Adult Literacy Surveys. In cross-sectional data there is a weak negative partial...

This paper investigates whether policies that encourage recipients to exit welfare for full-time employment influence participation in educational activity. The Self-Sufficiency Project ('SSP') was a demonstration project where long-term welfare recipients randomly assigned to the treatment...

Recent research into the Australian labour market has reported that a substantial proportion of the tertiary-educated labour force is under-utilised relative to their level of education, echoing findings from an expanding international literature. This paper uses recent panel data from the 2010...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

Previous studies of labor market outcomes such as employment and wages have mostly been limited to investigating the impact of formal schooling only and, as a consequence, have seldom considered skills or alternative routes to acquiring skills, such as adult literacy programs, or other types of...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

This paper studies the educational investment decisions of returning migrants while abroad in the context of their decisions about the choice of activity upon returning and the duration of migration. The theoretical model builds on Dustmann (1999), Dustmann and Kirchkamp (1992) and Mesnard...

Canada's immigration system is currently undergoing significant change driven by several goals that include (1) a desire to improve the economic outcomes of entering immigrants; (2) an attempt to better respond to short-term regional labor market shortages often associated with commodity booms,...