We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Shifts in the incidence of various types of training over the 1980s favored more-educated, more-experienced workers. Coupled with the fact that this training is associated with higher wages, these shifts suggest that training may have contributed to the growth of wage inequality in this period....

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

Human capital is almost always identified as a crucial ingredient for growing economies, but empirical investigations of cross-national growth have done little to clarify the dimensions of relevant human capital or any implications for policy. This paper concentrates on the importance of labor...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

We use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women. This analysis yields evidence of biases in OLS estimates of wage equations for white and black women, some of which are detected only when these two sources of bias are...

This paper provides evidence on a wide set of margins along which labor markets can adjust in response to increases in the minimum wage, including wages, hours, employment, and ultimately labor income, representing the central margins of adjustment that impact the economic well-being of workers...

In this paper, we first describe the 1990 DEED, the most recently constructed matched employer-employee data set for the United States that contains detailed demographic information on workers (most notably, information on education). We then use the data from manufacturing establishments in the...

Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn...

The role of improved schooling, a central part of most development strategies, has become controversial because expansion of school attainment has not guaranteed improved economic conditions. This paper reviews the role of education in promoting economic well-being, with a particular focus on...