In this study I examine the impact of fluctuations in the unemployment rate before high school graduation on educational attainment measured 30 years later. I find evidence that educational attainment is countercyclical, as found in other studies, but also find that the impact of the...

Mental health problems - and depression in particular - have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on measures of child wellbeing and the...

In this paper we analyse the effects of changes in the institutional design of the educational system on school attainment. In particular, we test whether alternative reforms have increased the average educational attainment of the population and whether various deciles of the education...

Mental health problems – and depression in particular – have been rising internationally. The link between poor mental health and poor educational outcomes is particularly interesting in the case of the UK which has a low international ranking both on measures of child wellbeing and the...

When students themselves enjoy large degrees of freedom in determining the duration of their studies, it results in a fairly large degree of interindividual variance in terms of time-to-degree. This paper investigates individual time-to-degree in a model where students determine the optimum...

This paper estimates the impact of elite school attendance on long-run outcomes including completed education, income and fertility. Our data consists of individuals born in the 1950s and educated in a UK district that assigned students to either elite or non-elite secondary schools. Using...

This paper presents the first analysis in the literature of the effect of test-based grade retention on adult criminal convictions. We exploit math and English test cutoffs for promotion to ninth grade in Louisiana using administrative data on all public K-12 students combined with...

Using Chinese Household Income Project survey data from 2013, this paper investigates the effects of family size and birth order on children's educational attainment. The endogeneity of family size is an important identification issue in the test of the quantity-quality tradeoff. We use...

Each year an estimated two million children in the United States repeat a grade. Investing an additional year in the same grade is expected to help a child to acquire the academic skills she lacks. This, in turn, would help her to be successful in higher grades. In spite of its popularity, grade...

Despite the fact that migraine headache is common and debilitating, very little is known about its effect on educational attainment. Using data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the relationship between migraine headache and four outcomes: high school...