The accumulation of the human capital stock plays a key role to explain the economic performance across regions. However, empirical evidence for this claim has been not very convincing, probably due to low quality of the data. This paper provides a robustness analysis of alternative human...

In the 1990s polytechnic education reform took place in Finland, which gradually expanded higher education to all Finnish regions; the polytechnics constituted a new non-university sector in higher education. This reform is used to study the causal effect of education on the inter-regional...

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in...

Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children until one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains...

School funding per pupil increased substantially between 1999-00 and 2012-13 in England. It also became more varied across schools with higher levels of funds targeted at more deprived schools. Real-terms increases in funding per pupil were much larger for the most deprived group of primary and...

We revisit the influential economic growth model by Lucas (1988) ["On the mechanics of economic development." Journal of Monetary Economics, 22(1):3-42], assuming that households optimally allocate consumption and education over the life-cycle given an exogenous interest rate and exogenous...

The rise in education of women relative to men is an emerging worldwide phenomenon in recent decades. This paper investigates the impact of the birth control policies on teenage girls' education attainment. The estimates suggest that the policies explain 30 percent of the education increase for...

We investigate the effects of human capital accumulation on trade and productivity by integrating a micro-founded education and fertility decision of households into a model of international trade with firm heterogeneity. Our theoretical framework leads to two testable implications: i) the...

This paper analyses the influence of country-level education mismatch on the individual-level relationship between education and the probability of being unemployed or staying in alternative labour statuses, for young people aged 15-34 in 2006, 2008 and 2010, living in 21 EU countries. We assume...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess...