We analyse wage differentials between Higher Education graduates in the UK, differentiating between polytechnic and university graduates. Polytechnic graduates earned on average lower wages than university graduates prior to the UK Further and Higher Education Act of 1992. The reform changed the...

Die neue Weiterbildungsliteratur zeigt auf, dass Arbeitgeber in monopsonistisch geprägten Märkten bereit sind, nicht nur die Kosten für firmenspezifische, sondern auch für allgemeine Weiterbildung zu tragen, wenn das Risiko, dass Mitarbeiter abgeworben werden, gering ist. Dies bedeutet, dass...

Individuals with more years of education generally acquire more training later on in life. Such a relationship may be due to skills learned in early periods increasing returns to educational investments in later periods. This paper addresses the question whether the complementarity between...

Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital...

In a context of demographic change, European governments seek ways to keep the skill set of the labor force flexible. One option to achieve this goal is widening access to college education to non-traditional students, such as those vocationally trained. Assessing whether this is a promising...

The claim that marriage is a venue for status exchange of achieved traits, like education, and ascribed attributes, notably race and ethnic membership, has regained traction in the social stratifi cation literature. Most studies that consider status exchanges ignore birthplace as a social...

The relationship between deprivation and educational outcomes has been the subject of a long-running and deep debate in the economic literature. Recent discussions have focused on causality, with experimental and quasi-experimental approaches taken, yet, predominantly, the literature continues...

While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the “gold standard” for impact evaluation, they face numerous practical barriers to implementation. In some circumstances, a randomized-encouragement design (RED) is a viable alternative, but applications are surprisingly rare. We discuss the...

In this paper, we investigate sibling correlations in educational outcomes, which serve as a broad measure of the importance of family and community background. Making use of rich longitudinal survey and register data for Denmark, our main aim is to identify the parental background...

We use 2009 Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) data to link institutional arrangements in OECD countries to the disparity in reading, math, and science test scores for migrant and native-born students. We find that achievement gaps are larger for those migrant youths who arrive...