We study the long-term effects of a randomized intervention targeting children's socio-emotional skills. The classroom-based intervention for primary school children has positive impacts that persist for over a decade. Treated children become more likely to complete academic high school and...

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....

We conduct an empirical simulation exercise that gauges the plausible impact of increased rates of college attainment on a variety of measures of income inequality and economic insecurity. Using two different methodological approaches-a distributional approach and a causal parameter approach-we...

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...

This paper shows that returns to education are not enough to capture all the returns to human capital. Using longitudinal data of all college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skillsincluding literacy, numeracy, foreign language,...

We study the long-term effects of a randomized intervention targeting children’s socio-emotional skills. The classroom-based intervention for primary school children has positive impacts that persist for over a decade. Treated children become more likely to complete academic high school and...

We use OECD-PIAAC data to estimate the earnings effects of both years of education and of numerical skills. Our identification strategy exploits differential exposure to educational reforms across birth cohorts and countries. We find that education has the strongest earnings effect. A one...

To understand the socio-economic enrollment gap in university attendance, we elicit students’ beliefs about the benefits of university education in a sample of 2,540 secondary school students. Our choice model estimates reveal that perceived non-pecuniary benefits explain a large share of the...

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for...

We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school-attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of...