This paper examines the way immigrant earnings are determined in Australia. It uses the overeducation/required education/undereducation (ORU) framework (Hartog, 2000) and a decomposition of the native-born/foreign-born differential in the payoff to schooling developed by Chiswick and Miller...

General recognition of the benefits that skills provide to the individual, the firm and the economy has translated into the increased importance of education and training, as well as higher postsecondary education participation rates. However, participation in education and training is unevenly...

There have been substantial changes in the costs and benefits of investment in tertiary education in Australia in the past twenty years. This paper compares the ex ante private rate of return to investment in a university education based on cross section data, for cohorts studying at the time of...

Overeducation is a form of labour underutilization which occurs when the formal education level of a worker exceeds that which is required for the job. In Australia close to 30 per cent of workers are overeducated and are underutilising their skills. Using data from the Negotiating the Life...

Undertaking econometric modelling using samples from small populations such as Indigenous Australians, is difficult because of the data constraints facing both the researcher and the data collection agency. This paper uses the ABS’s Remote Access Data Laboratory to analyse an expanded unit...

This paper analyses high school completion rates, known as ‘apparent retention rates’ in Australia, from 1989 to 2002. Unlike most measures of educational attainment or participation in Australia, the apparent retention rate was lower at the end of the 1990s than it had been in the early...

Early childhood is a critical time for establishing the communication and literacy skills that shape children’s subsequent academic, social and employment opportunities. Debates around the family environments that support children’s optimal development, have focused on mothers’ workforce...

This paper investigates the short-term effects of a reduction in the length of high school on students' personality traits using a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced from nine...

This paper analyzes the effect of educational mismatch on wages in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Educational mismatch has been discussed extensively, mostly by applying OLS wage regressions which are prone to an unobserved heterogeneity bias. This problem is...

This paper studies the effect of attending a high-quality secondary school on subsequent educational outcomes. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study in which we observe children when they make their secondary school choice (between ages 10-12) and later when...