This study uses the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) data, the only cross-national data having measured educational achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate educational achievement decline of fourth graders across 21 European countries between 2016 and...

This paper examines adult education in Hungary for the years 1999, 2001 and 2003 along three dimensions: (a) the fraction of individuals participating in adult education, (b) their demographic and socio-economic characteristics and (c) the probability of participating in adult education / adult...

This paper uses EU-SILC data from 2005 and 2006 to explore the hypothesis that international differences in rates of return to education reflect variations in the level of risk associated with educational investments. While there was some evidence to support this hypothesis with regards to...

The paper analyses alternative investment policies and their consequences for the evolution of human capital in Europe based on a model of age dependent skill formation where the life span depends on investments during childhood. What makes the approach special is the analysis of the returns to...

The paper investigates the effect of teacher characteristics (experience, level of education attainment and credentials, gender) on the achievement of eighth grade students using matched student-teacher data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 TIMSS surveys. The analysis covers European countries, thus...

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...

This paper assesses the impact the Great Recession had on individuals' transitions to and from unemployment in Ireland. The rate of transition from unemployment to employment declined between 2006 and 2011, while the rate from employment to unemployment increased. The results indicate that young...

In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We...

Tertiary education has been expanding hugely over the last decades, so that tertiary dropout students will constitute a growing distinctive group in future labour markets. University dropout is regularly discussed as a "negative" indicator in terms of reinforcing socio-economic inequalities and...