Increasing dispersion in the returns to graduate education is found, using quantile regression. This trend is related to rising overqualification. We distinguish between and validate measures of Real and Formal overqualification, according to whether it is or is not accompanied by...

This paper reports estimates of the UK “college premium” for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. This implies that graduate supply...

This paper estimates the return to education using two alternative instrumental variable estimators: one exploits variation in schooling associated with early smoking behaviour, the other uses the raising of the minimum school leaving age. Each instrument estimates a 'local average treatment...

This paper reports estimates of the UK college premiumʺ for young graduates across successive cohorts from large cross section datasets for the UK pooled from 1994 to 2006 - a period when the higher education participation rate increased dramatically. The growth in relative labour demand...

Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates - to approximately the same level as their male athletic participation rates - in order to comply with Title IX, a policy change that provides a unique quasi-experiment in female athletic...

Existing growth research provides little explanation for the very large differences in long-run growth performance across OECD countries. We show that cognitive skills can account for growth differences within the OECD, whereas a range of economic institutions and quantitative measures of...

Papers in this volume and elsewhere consistently find a strong relationship between children's cognitive abilities and their parents' socio-economic position (SEP). Most studies seeking to explain the paths through which SEP affects cognitive skills suffer from a potentially serious omitted...

Finding an instrument that is orthogonal to the disturbance term in the wage equation has been a topic of great deal of debate. Recently, Chesson et al. (2006) proposed that higher discount rates are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviours, including having sex before age of...