Using unique data on preference rankings for all high school students who apply for college in Ireland, we investigate whether, conditional on absolute achievement, within school-cohort rank in English and math affects choice of college major. We find that higher rank in math increases the...

The empirical literature on employer learning assumes that employers learn about unobserved ability differences across workers as they spend time in the labor market. This article describes testable implications that arise from this basic hypothesis and how they have been used to quantify the...

Most studies investigating the poor earnings performance of immigrants implicitly assume that human capital endowments determine actual earnings, and that immigrant-nativeborn wage gaps can be analyzed in terms of those earnings. In this study we claim that this assumption is not validated by...

An association between health and education has been well-established empirically. It is not clear however whether this represents a causal effect and, if so, in which direction. Recent research has attempted to unravel this by using educational reforms, such as compulsory schooling laws, as...

Do students benefit from compulsory schooling? In an important article, Oreopoulos (2006) studied the 1947 British compulsory schooling law change and found large returns to schooling of about 15% using the General Household Survey (GHS). Reanalysing this dataset, we find much smaller returns of...