We study whether the combined significant reduction in the pupil-teacher ratio and increase in parental education observed in Italy between the end of World War II and the end of the 1980s have had a significant impact on the educational attainment and the labor market returns of a...

We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model for Germany and study...

Standard estimates of earnings profiles ignore the fact that, with unobserved heterogeneity, cross-section evidence need not reflect the `true' relationship between earnings and tenure. In this paper we argue that the observation of the position filled by an employee in the firm hierarchy is...

In spite of their relative vicinity Scandinavian countries and Central European countries (mainly Germany) have substantially different schooling institutions. While the former group of countries delays school tracking until age 16, the latter group anticipates differentiation between age 10 and...

We produce estimates of the pecuniary costs of inadequate investment in human capital for countries, macro regions and the world at large. These costs are borne by individuals (private costs), the government (fiscal costs), and society, which includes both individuals and the government (social...