The lack of formal education and competences of the Portuguese workers is one of the biggest problems of the country. This lack is not shrinking at the wanted speed and the young generations still lag far behind the ones in other OCDE countries. This paper studies the intergenerational...

Over the last decades the German education system underwent numerous reforms in order to improve “equality of opportunity”, i.e. to guarantee all pupils independent of parental background equal access to higher education. At the same time internationally comparative evidence yields that...

Height is positively associated with educational attainment. We investigate the mechanisms behind this relationship using data on German pre-teen students. We show that taller children are more likely to enroll in Gymnasium, the most academic secondary school track, and that primary school...

In this paper we suggest a simple decomposition of the correlation coefficient of education to account for the different intergenerational mobility of subgroups of the population, which is of key importance from a policy perspective.

Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these...

Students face four decision margins: (a) How many years to spend in school, (b) What to study, (c) How much effort to devote to learning per year and (d) Whether to disrupt or assist the learning of classmates. The thousands of studies that have applied human capital theory to the first two...