Because a significant portion of U.S. students lacks critical mathematic skills, schools across the country are investing heavily in computerized curriculums as a way to enhance education output, even though there is surprisingly little evidence that they actually improve student achievement. In...

Individual time preference determines schooling enrolment. Moreover, smoking behavior in early ages has been shown to be highly related to time preference rates. Accordingly, we use smoking at age 16 as an instrument for schooling in order to cope with ability bias in a returns to education...

Expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labor economists as a major determinant of educational attainment. In spite of this, the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce. In this paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the...

This study deals with educational production in Austria and is focused on the potential impact of schoolmates on students’ academic outcomes. We used PISA 2000 data to estimate peer effects for 15 and 16 year old students. The estimations yield substantial positive effects of the peer...

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and...

After three years in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), collegiate football players face a trade-off between spending more time in the NCAA and pursuing a career in the National Football League (NFL) by declaring for the draft. We analyze the starting salaries and signing...

In 1980, seven out of the seventeen Spanish regions were devolved education spending responsibility. Using a difference-in-differences approach, which I show to be particularly credible in this context, I evaluate the long term effect of this reform on human capital. I find no robust evidence to...

This paper analyzes how student achievement is affected by resource increases in the Swedish compulsory school due to a special government grant that was enforced in the academic year of 2001/02. The analysis is based on register data that contains all students that completed compulsory...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of "gap years" between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

This paper investigates changes in educational wage differentials in Sweden between 1992 and 2001 and places them in a longer-term perspective. The university wage premium has increased noticeably between 1992 and 2001 while the gymnasium wage premium has been constant. These results, together...