In this paper we evaluate the impact of a major school reform, that took place in the 1950s in Sweden, on educational attainment and earnings. The reform, which has many common elements with reforms in other European countries including the UK, consisted of increasing compulsor schooling,...

To our knowledge, this paper provides the first study evaluating the effects of higher education for adults on the timing of retirement. Using detailed longitudinal population register data 1982-2010, we track first-time enrollees in higher education in 1992-1993. Our sample is aged 42-55 at the...

The great majority of studies on the effect of school quality on academic outcomes do not take account of changes in student choices concerning effort if school quality, e.g. class size, changes. We show that empirical estimates of the "total" effect of changes in school quality could be quite...

With this paper our objective is to study the effects of different deficit policies in an endogenous growth model with publicly funded human capital accumulation and public debt, where we allow for heterogeneous households. Two types of households are considered. One household acquires human...

An attempt is made in this paper to examine the impacts of government spending on human capital on human development indicators like healthcare outcomes, education achievements and increase in national income in Namibia using time series data from 1980 to 2015. The analysis reveals a significant...

The existence of a rigid cutoff date which determines when children start primary school creates a large heterogeneity in students' level of maturity within the classroom. We use rich administrative data of the universe of public schools in Catalonia to show that: (1) relatively younger children...

A growing proportion of the U.S. workforce will have been raised in disadvantaged environments that are associated with relatively high proportions of individuals with diminished cognitive and social skills. A cross-disciplinary examination of research in economics, developmental psychology, and...

In this paper, we examine whether adult education delays retirement and increases labour force participation among the elderly, a mechanism suggested in the OECD strategy for "active ageing" and the "Lisbon strategy" of the EU. Using register data from Sweden, we analyse transcripts from adult...

The belief that both the behavior and outcomes of students are affected by their peers is important in shaping education policy. I analyze two polar education systems -tracking and mixing- and propose several criteria for their comparison. I find that tracking is the system that maximizes...

A number of studies have shown that education reforms extending compulsory schooling reduce criminal behavior of those affected by the reform. We consider the effects of a major Swedish educational reform on crime by exploiting its staggered implementation across Sweden. We first show that the...