In an ideal world, primary education would be universal and publicly financed, and all children would be able to attend school regardless of their parents’ ability or willingness to pay. In many poor countries, however, governments lack either the financial resources or the political will to...

This paper quantifies the magnitude and nature of migration flows from the Caribbean and estimates their costs and benefits. The Caribbean countries have lost 10-40 percent of their labor force due to emigration to OECD member countries. The migration rates are particularly striking for the...

We study the long-run and multi-generational effects of a mass education program in Vietnam during the First Indochina War (1946-1954). Difference-in-difference estimations indicate that the children of mothers exposed to the education program had an average of 0.9 more years of education. We...

The literature on the effects of natural resources on education is mixed and inconclusive. In this paper, we adopt an innovative approach by exploring the effects of mineral discoveries and productions on intergenerational educational mobility (IM), linking parents to the children education...

Using two polygenic scores (PGS) for educational attainment in a biomedical study of all those born in a single week in Great Britain in 1958 we show that the genetic predisposition for educational attainment is associated with labour market participation and wages over the life- course for men...

Family background shapes individual outcomes throughout life. While the existing literature documents how the importance of family background, typically measured by the degree of sibling correlation in socioeconomic outcomes, varies across countries, less is known about heterogeneities across...