This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

We study the relationship between political regimes and higher education and its implications for social mobility and political opposition in the context of the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. We show that the Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and...

We study the effect of political regime change on higher education and its distributional and political consequences. We focus on the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. The Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and fiscal conservatism led to a large reduction...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

University research has formed the foundation for many of the most significant U.S. technological advancements. However, many more ideas are left on the shelves and in the laboratories of academe, waiting to be discovered. Although thousands of university innovations have been transformed into...

Asia's rapid population aging fortifies the case for strengthening human capital investments. Further, the experience of the newly industrialized economies suggests that human capital investments will be a vital ingredient of the transition from middle income to high income. Those investments...

Higher education in India has expanded remarkably during the post-independence period, and more impressively during the last three to four decades, emerging as the second largest system in the world after China. However, the growth has not been even and, being unplanned, unregulated and market...

Numeracy skills of adults within and across 12 different countries in 2011 are strongly associated with the accumulated public investments in education received by these adults during their schooling. This paper confirms existing evidence that the timing of educational investments is important,...

Asia's rapid population aging fortifies the case for strengthening human capital investments. Further, the experience of the newly industrialized economies suggests that human capital investments will be a vital ingredient of the transition from middle income to high income. Those investments...

Education and training are a high priority for Costa Rica that devotes to them more than 6.5% of GDP, one of the highest spending shares among OECD countries. However, educational outcomes remain poor and firms struggle to fill their vacancies, particularly in technical and scientific positions,...