This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

Disruptions in family life can take many forms, but all have the potential to impact student learning. With school administrative data matched to birth records, I estimate the effect of unexpected changes in the home environment, or family shocks, on achievement. Identification comes from...

87 percent of Canadians who in 1990 had incomes in the lowest quintile, in 2009 had incomes that placed them in higher quintiles. Of those in the highest quintile, 36 percent had moved to lower ones. All Canadians have been getting richer, the poor more than the rich; the middle class has not...

The 2007-09 Great Recession has led to an unprecedented increase in public debt in many countries, triggering substantial fiscal adjustments. What are the distributional consequences of fiscal austerity measures? This is an important policy question. This paper analyzes the effects of fiscal...

How society invests in human capital is important for economic growth and social welfare. The paper reports from the first experiment designed to elicit people's preferences for how to prioritize educational resources, where 2,000 Americans trade off educational resources between quick and slow...

In this paper the Signalling approach to the explanation of wage differentials is analyzed in a critical way. Departing from the classic Spence's model, the article shows how the introduction of inequalities in accessing to education leads to separating equilibria characterized by redistributive...

This paper examines how skills are shaped by social interactions in families. We show that older siblings causally affect younger sibling's education choices and early career earnings. We focus on critical course choices in high school and overcome the identification challenges of estimating...

The weak quality of education received by most poor children in South Africa places them in permanent disadvantage relative to those attending the mainly more affluent and better performing schools. This document draws from a large number of studies undertaken for a major project and summarises...

This paper re-evaluates the effect of US public school competition on children's educational achievement based on a large longitudinal school profile composed from the Common Core of Data (CCD at NCES). To reconcile the endogenous shift of local competition measures driven by demand side sorting...

Can surveys affect human capital investments? This paper examines whether individual education choices and outcomes are affected by a survey posing questions related to investments, performance, preferences, and expectations. We have administrative data for the whole Swedish population to which...