Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

Over the past twenty years, colleges have invested an increasing share of their endowment assets in “alternative investments.” Prior to 2009, an alternatives emphasis had been widely credited for the sterling endowment investment returns earned by many colleges. However, with college...

Finding an instrument that is orthogonal to the disturbance term in the wage equation has been a topic of great deal of debate. Recently, Chesson et al. (2006) proposed that higher discount rates are significantly associated with a range of sexual behaviours, including having sex before age of...

The school resources – educational outcomes debate has focused almost exclusively on spending levels. We extend this by analysing the relationship between student achievement and schools' budget allocation decisions using panel data. Per-pupil expenditure has only a modest relationship with...

This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged African-American youth. Estimates of the rate of return to the Perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from...

Our study investigates the social conditions in which the Preferential School Subsidy (SEP) reform implemented in Chile in 2008 has influenced students' achievement in 4th grade. SEP reform has been widely evaluated. However, it is less known how the social conditions under which a reform can be...

It is well-known that public pension plans exhibit substantial cross-subsidies, both within cohorts, e.g. from early leavers to those who retire at the “sweet spot”, and across cohorts, through unfunded liabilities. However, the cross-subsidies within and across cohorts have never been...

This paper investigates the impact of changes in the funding of higher education in England on students' choices and outcomes. Over the last two decades – through three major reforms in 1998, 2006 and 2012 – undergraduate university education in public universities moved from being free to...

While studies find that need-based financial aid can increase college access, persistence, and completion, little is known about how tuition subsidies affect students after they have enrolled in college and how losing aid impacts postsecondary attainment. I shed light on these questions by...

Within the research community, there is a vigorous debate over whether additional educational expenditures will lead to improved performance of schools. Some of the debate is an outgrowth of the lack of causal knowledge of the impacts of expenditures on student outcomes. To help fill this void,...