The main goal of this paper is to document and analyze the long-term evolution of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in the four largest European economies (France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy). Relative IOp represents an important portion of total income inequality, with values ranging from...

The NZ labour market is among the most flexible in the OECD, and outcomes for its young people have been among the best. However, labour-market opportunities are heavily determined by initial education, where New Zealand’s system is also successful and innovative in many ways. Average PISA...

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...

We seek to quantify the role of education as a mechanism through which family background affects earnings. To this end, we propose a generalisation of statistical 'mediation analysis'. In our approach, the treatment and mediator can be multidimensional. This allows us to directly and flexibly...

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...

This study analyzes four different transmission mechanisms, through which father's earnings affect son's earnings: the educational attainment, cognitive skills, the cultural capital of the family and the social capital in the neighborhood. Using a unique data set that combines panel data from a...

In this paper, we study parental beliefs about the technology which maps parental investments into future child outcomes. We document that parents perceive late investments as more productive than early investments, and that they perceive investments in different time periods as substitutes....

Using microsimulations, we nowcast the impact of learning losses caused by COVID-19 on secondary school completion rates, intergenerational mobility of education, and long-run earnings inequality in eight countries Sub-Saharan Africa. On average, secondary school completion rates decrease by 12...

This paper studies heterogeneity in schooling decisions by socio-economic status (SES) in response to a repeal of achievement-based admissions requirements (i.e. binding track recommendations) in Germany's between-school tracking system. The main contribution is to show that while previously...

This paper develops a labour market model with on-the-job search, match-specific productivity draws and an endogenous irreversible schooling decision. The choice of schoolin is modelled as an optimal stopping problem which gives rise to the equilibrium heterogeneity of workers with respect to...