I examine teenage pregnancy in Ghana, focusing on the role and interplay of Ghanaian and English reading skills, formal educational attainment, and adult literacy program participation. Pursuing several alternative identification strategies three main results are established. First, I confirm...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...

It is argued that human capital theory applies only weakly to artists' decisions about investment in schooling and training and about occupational choice. However, the same can be said about the sorting model. What is lacking in cultural economics is an understanding of talent and creativity,...

The last decades have shown that the traditional steady job with a permanent contract is on the decline. While permanent contracts and the insider position that they bring are highly valued by workers, research on the returns to human capital have predominantly focused on wages as subject of...

Benjamin W. Arold prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2022 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays that...

Pietro Sancassani prepared this study while he was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institut. The study was completed in March 2023 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical essays and...

Of great importance to the future World economy is the future labor force of Asia, as Asia is by far the most populous region in the World. Expected future levels of education, very young and youth population, youth employment and unemployment, dependency rates, human capital per capita, and the...

Generous maternity leave, affordable daycare, extensive social safety nets, excellent universal health care, and high-quality public schools, are all notable features of Nordic countries. There is a widespread belief that such strong public investments in children contribute to a levelled...

We investigate the relationship between child socio-emotional skills and labour market outcomes using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We perform a novel factor analysis of child skills and capture four latent dimensions, representing "attention", "conduct", "emotional", and...

This research claims that investing European Union (EU) Structural Funds in Learning Mobility (LM) might lead to further regional polarization. LM is a type of labour mobility finalized to acquire new knowledge (human capital) and social networks (social capital). Historically, LM has been...