The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

College students select their majors for a variety of reasons, including expected returns in the labor market. This paper demonstrates an empirical method that links a census of U.S. degrees and fields of study with measures of the knowledge content of jobs. The study combines individual wage...

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

It is well known that children reared in non-intact families on average have less favorable educational outcomes than children reared in two-parent families. Evidence from the United States and Sweden indicates that living in a non-intact family is correlated with lower educational attainment....

Using American panel data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) this paper investigates the effect of working during grade 12 on attainment. We exploit the longitudinal nature of the NELS by employing, for the first time in the related literature, a semiparametric...

After the "3+2" University reform in Italy there has been a fast increase in the number of students. A common wisdom is that this result was partly achieved by reducing the standard of Higher Education (HE). In this paper we first build a theoretical model in which individuals decide whether to...

This paper investigates empirically the determinants of individuals’ attitudes towards preventing environmental damage in Spain using data from the World Values Survey and European Values Survey for the periods 1990, 1995 and 1999/2000. Compared to many previous studies, we present a richer...

In questo articolo vengono analizzati i fattori che influenzano l’impegno di studio, e conseguentemente la performance degli studenti iscritti all’universit` a e quelli che spingono gli studenti a indirizzarsi verso uno specifico corso di laurea (facolt`a). In particolare, un modello teorico...

Negli ultimi anni, l’Università italiana Š stata investita da un profondo cambiamento che ha comportato un vasto processo di revisione normativa, l'ampliamento e trasformazione della popolazione studentesca e l'intensificazione delle dinamiche concorrenziali tra gli Atenei. Il riconoscimento...

Getting a university degree offers substantial financial returns, for women more so than men and for undergraduate degrees more so than advanced degrees. This report finds that high returns to education signal high labour demand in particular fields relative to supply, information which is...