This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

Holzer and Baum's recent book, 'Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students,' provides an excellent up-to-date review of higher education. My review first summarizes its key themes: 1) who gains from college and why? 2) mismatch and the need for more structure; 3) problems...

This essay delivers two main innovations with respect to the existing literature. First, and foremost, by extending the work of Nicaise (2010) relative to the reservation wage to the case of overeducation, we propose a statistical test to discriminate between alternative theoretical...

This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

This essay discusses the determinants of youth unemployment within the EU and then the alternative policy options currently at stake. We argue that youth unemployment regards especially some peripheral EU countries and is due to a mix of factors that should be addressed more vigorously, starting...

We present results from a five-year effort to design promising online and text-message interventions to improve college achievement through several distinct channels. From a sample of nearly 25,000 students across three different campuses, we find some improvement from coaching-based...

Le niveau de vie moyen des Tunisiens a augmenté de façon continue depuis plusieurs décennies tandis que la pauvreté et les inégalités ont largement diminué grâce à la mise en oeuvre de nombreux programmes sociaux. L’accès aux infrastructures de base telles que l’eau potable ou...

From individual-level data for nine entire cohorts of undergraduate students in UK universities, we estimate the probability that an individual will drop out of university during their first-year. We examine the 1984-85 to 1992-93 cohorts of students enrolling full-time for a three or four-year...

We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for postsecondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a...

Cognitive and non-cognitive tests are key factors in many aspects of economics, especially within labour market analysis. Non-cognitive tests and personality traits are increasingly used, as these are found to be as critical as cognitive abilities for labour market outcomes, while they might be...