In 1997, the French government put into effect a law that permanently exempted young French male citizens born after Jan 1, 1979 from mandatory military service while still requiring those born before that cutoff date to serve. This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the...

This paper studies the efficiency of educational choices in a two sector/two schooling level matching model of the labour market where a continuum of heterogenous workers allocates itself between sectors depending on their decision to invest in education. Individuals differ in ability and...

Many empirical works suggest that education has a positive effect on earnings not only because it raises human capital but also because it functions as a signal when employers have incomplete information on employees' skills. The signaling role could have important consequences on the dynamics...

The famous Mincer equation regressing log earnings on years of schooling is derived from a linear human capital accumulation equation at the individual level. Even if the cross-sectional Mincer equation holds at the level of individuals, it does not hold at the macro level of countries because...

European labour markets have known three major changes over the past three decades : the complexification of the technological environment, the growth of general education across the workforce, and rising unemployment. Taken together, do these facts reflect the inefficiency of schooling and...

We calibrate an endogenous growth model to study the effect of the quality of human capital on productivity growth in a sample of thirty developed and developing countries for the period 1980 to 2007. We measure quality of human capital by relative cognitive skills. These are country scores in...

This paper estimates the returns to education in Guatemala, while attempting to account for self-employment and the presence of workers without monetary earnings in the economy, factors whose omission can potentially lead to sample selection bias. The analysis uses data from the Survey of Living...

This paper attempts to tackle the puzzle of why more Canadians choose community colleges over universities than their American counterparts, when previous research has suggested that the return to community college education is low in Canada. Using data from the Survey of Labour and Income...

This paper re-examines the “sheepskin effects” of educational credentials in Canada using data from the 1996 Census and Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. I found that the estimated credential effects are sensitive to specifications. Regressions analysis in the standard model may not be...

This paper examines the relationship between the education level of Spanish emigrants and their country of destination. Since Spanish emigrants were born under the same laws, economic conditions, and institutions, the differences in their destination countries can be due to dissimilarities in...