This paper estimates the effect of home high-speed internet on national test scores of students at age 14. We combine comprehensive information on the telecom network, administrative student records, house prices and local amenities in England in a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design...

This paper examines various efficiency and equity aspects related to the skill acquisition of young people and older adults. The analysis suggests that such human capital investment is associated with significant labour-market gains for individuals, including higher post-tax earnings and better...

"Right to Buy" (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. A key feature of RTB is...

We estimate the impact of a large curriculum reform in Switzerland that substantially increased the share of foreign language classes in compulsory school on students' subsequent educational choices in upper secondary school. Using administrative student register data and exploiting the...

We examine whether parental and school investments reinforce or compensate for student performance. Our analysis exploits school-starting-age rules in 34 countries, capturing achievement variation that arises because younger children typically underperform their older peers. Parents respond to...

In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooling from 6 to 5 years. Since this policy changed the duration of primary school while providing the same diploma, we can estimate the human capital...

The behavioral revolution within economics has been largely driven by psychological insights, with the sister sciences playing a lesser role. This study leverages insights from sociology to explore the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the...

Various grading reforms and trends of more lenient grading have contributed to grade inflation in Sweden and other countries. Previous research shows that over-grading increases higher education enrolment, achievements and earnings, but no study has yet addressed the potential impact of grading...

We study the causal relationship between educational attainment and teenage birth rates by focusing on a large-scale, country-wide reform that made high school compulsory and removed previously existing school capacity constraints in Mexico. Relying on administrative data on schools and births,...

"Right to Buy" (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. A key feature of RTB is...