This paper is an empirical investigation of inequality of education opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). We use student scores from tests administered by the international consortium Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for a number of MENA countries and over time...

Youth Exclusion in Iran: The State of Education, Employment and Family Formation

Despite nearly three decades of revolutionary government rule in Iran poverty and inequality remain the central issues of political debate in Iran. Public dissatisfaction, as demonstrated by the electoral success of the populist candidate in the 2005 presidential election, has been widely...

In recent years Iran has greatly expanded its early childhood education program, taking first place in the Middle East in preschool enrolment. In this paper we examine the reasons for the unusual expansion and argue that it is in large part an institutional response to demographic changes in...

We consider the effect of labor market rigidities on human capital accumulation and economic growth when some human capital is difficult to observe prior to employment. We distinguish between two types of human capital, those that formal schooling and test scores can measure (``knowledge") and...

This paper presents a comparative study of private returns to schooling of urban men in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey using similar survey data and a uniform methodology. We employ three surveys for each country that span nearly two decades, from the 1980s to 2006, and, to increase the comparability...