This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers' careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learningby- Doing (LBD) and...

Instrumental variables estimators typically must satisfy monotonicity conditions to be interpretable as capturing local average treatment effects. Building on previous research that suggests monotonicity is unlikely to hold in the context of school entrance age effects, we develop an approach...

It can be argued that just as there are different kinds of literacy, there are different kinds of illiteracy. A "proximate illiterate," i.e. an illiterate who has easy access to a literate person, is clearly better off than someone without such access. The existing literature that takes account...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

To study effects of out-of-school learning we use data on boarding home pupils who attended elementary public schools in the 1940's. The out-of-school environment at the boarding homes could be considered being more learner friendly than the home environment on average: the pupils at the...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...

The choice of a college major plays a critical role in determining the future earnings of college graduates. Students make their college major decisions in part due to the future earnings streams associated with the different majors. We survey students about what their expected earnings would be...

Using a panel of international student test scores 1980 2000 (PISA and TIMSS), panel fixed effects estimates suggest that government spending decentralization is conducive to student performance. The effect does not appear to be mediated through levels of educational spending. -- Fiscal...

Does more schooling causes a delay in marriage? Using a nationwide change in the compulsory schooling law in the UK as a source of exogenous variation in education, this paper estimates the causal effect of schooling on age at first marriage. The 1947 reform, which uniquely affected about a half...

Simple OLS estimates of the effect of school-imposed penalties for drug use on a student's consumption of marijuana are biased if both are determined by unobservable school or individual attributes. The potential reverse causality is also a challenge to retrieving estimates of the causal...