This study describes how minority enrollment probabilities respond to changes in admission policies from affirmative-action to merit-only programs and then to percentage plans when the demographic composition of the potential pool of applicants is also shifting. It takes advantage of admission...

There is much interest in explaining the persistent ethnic gaps in education among Israeli Jews; specifically, the much lower attainments of those from Asian and African countries compared to the rest - Mizrahim vs. Ashkenazim, respectively. Some explanations (especially early ones) have...

The scope of public human resource policy is outlined. Motivation for the need of transparency in this policy is provided in terms of informational asymmetries, human capital externalities, and long planning horizons. Transparency is defined both along a time dimension - ex ante and ex post -...

For several decades after WWII, Swedish education reforms were justified extensively based on democratic and equality arguments. The Social Democrats, the party in governing power during this era, considered a uniform education system crucial to their endeavors towards a greater democracy and...

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the...

This paper studies the effects of school choice on segregation. We analyze the effect of a reform in Stockholm that changed the admission system of public upper secondary schools. Before the year 2000, students had priority to the school situated closest to where they lived, but from the fall of...

This paper utilizes a policy change to estimate the effect of teacher density on student performance. We find that an increase in teacher density has a positive effect on student achievement. The baseline estimate – obtained by using the grade point average as the outcome variable – implies...

The debate over whether political democracy is the least bad regime, as Churchill once said, remains unresolved because history has been ignored or misread, and because recent statistical studies have not chosen the right tests. Using too little historical information, and mistaking formal...

This paper tests the extent to which the accumulation of basic cognitive skills, as measured by a post-schooling math test, matter for young dropouts entering today’s labor market. Based on a sample of dropouts who were age 16-18 when administered a math test in the late 1990s, estimates...

Amongst the active labor market policy programs for the unemployed in Sweden, the vocational employment training program is the most ambitious and expensive. We analyze its effect on the individual transition rate from unemployment to employment using a unique set of administrative data and a...