This chapter examines socioeconomic inequality in Latin America through the lens of race and ethnicity. We primarily use national census data from the International Public Use Micro Data Sample (IPUMS). Since censuses use inconsistent measures of race and ethnicity, we also draw on two...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

Sleep studies suggest that girls go to sleep earlier, are more active in the morning, and cope with sleep deprivation better than boys. We provide the first causal evidence on how gender differences in sleep cycles can help explain the gender performance gap. We exploit over 240,000...

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter...

This paper discusses various methods for assessing group differences in academic achievement using only the ordinal content of achievement test scores. Researchers and policymakers frequently draw conclusions about achievement differences between various populations using methods that rely on...

In 1997 Turkey passed a law making middle school completion compulsory, increasing the mandatory education from 5 to 8 years. At the time of this policy change, only 3-in-5 students were completing middle school in Turkey. In this paper, I employ data from the 2011 and 2012 Turkish Household...

Die Studie stellt die Bruttolohn- und Tariflohnentwicklung von Arbeitnehmern in der Privatwirtschaft und Angestellten im öffentlichen Dienst seit der Wiedervereinigung gegenüber. Dabei werden auch Sonderleistungen (wie Urlaubs- und Weihnachtsgeld, Überstundenzuschläge usw.), flexible...

Rapid education expansion and rising income inequality are two striking phenomena occurring in China during the transitional period. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data collected in 1997 and 2006, this paper studies how education affects individual earnings during the...

This paper employs Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions to examine the distributional effect of education on earnings in East Africa, using data from the Living Standards and Measurement Study (LSMS) for Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. Taking into consideration the pay period of the...