Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

Prior to the introduction of mother tongue based education in 1994, the language of instruction for most subjects in Ethiopia's primary schools was the official language (Amharic) - the mother tongue of only one third of the population. This paper uses the variation in individual's exposure to...

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 schooling increases average level of education in a country and provides other benefits, its effect on geographical distribution is, however, not obvious. We explore the effect of a sudden change in compulsory schooling in Turkey, that increased mandatory years of schooling from five...

We study students' motives for educational attainment in a unique survey of 885 secondary school students in the UK. As expected, students who perceive the monetary returns to education to be higher are more likely to intend to continue in full-time education. However, the main driver is the...

The Polish educational reform in 1999 is often considered successful as the results of the Polish students, and especially that of the low-performers, on the OECD PISA tests have improved significantly since the introduction of the new system. The reform extended the previous 8-year undivided...

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...

This is the first paper to experimentally examine effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrollment intentions and realized enrollment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six month after...

We study the effect of parental job loss on children's outcomes using administrative data from Finland. We focus on two channels through which parental job loss can affect children's careers: 1) by affecting the child's field of study choices and 2) by weakening social ties to the labor market....