This article deals with the issues of different theoretical approaches to education. Education is seen as a tool, how to distinct different marginal productivities of employees. We start from the fact of an information asymmetry on the labour markets, asymmetry between employers and potential...

Although the literature on assignment mechanisms emphasizes the importance of efficiency based on agents' preferences, policymakers may want to achieve different goals. For instance, school districts may want to affect student learning outcomes but must take teacher welfare into account when...

In imperfectly competitive labor markets returns to skills are lower than their productivity and educational standards may play an important role in stimulating students to provide effort. We propose a principal-agent model to analyze the determinants of student effort and the setting of...

We estimate the effect of the 1999 education reform in Poland on employment and earnings. The 1999 education reform in Poland replaced the previous 8 years of general and 3/4/5 years of tracked secondary education with 9 years of general and 3/3/4 years of tracked upper-secondary education. The...

This paper shows that when specifically controlling for schooling cognitive skills (e.g. the capacity to process information and apply knowledge) and not cognitive skills as a whole, close to 70% of the return to schooling is cognitive. This contrasts with the previous literature that strongly...

Previous studies report that adult height has significant associations with wages even controlling for schooling. But schooling and height are imperfect measures of adult cognitive skills (“brains”) and strength (“brawn”); further they are not exogenous. Analysis of rich Guatemalan...

A model is presented where workers of differing abilities and from different social backgrounds are assigned to jobs based on grades received at school. It is examined how this matching is affected if good grades are granted to some low ability students. Such grade inflation is shown to reduce...

This article explores the effects of a 2010 reform in Illinois that substantially increased the difficulty of passing a required basic skills test for all Illinois college students seeking a teaching certification. The policy led to a 33 percent decrease in education program enrollments and a 27...

We test the basic assumption underlying the job competition and crowding out hypothesis: that employers always prefer higher educated to lower educated individuals. To this end, we conduct a randomised field experiment in which duos of fictitious applications by bachelor and master graduates are...

Racial inequality in economic outcomes, particularly among the college educated, persists throughout US society. Scholars debate whether this inequality stems from racial differences in human capital (e.g., college selectivity, GPA, college major) or employer discrimination against black job...