An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Rapid education expansion and rising income inequality are two striking phenomena occurring in China during the transitional period. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data collected in 1997 and 2006, this paper studies how education affects individual earnings during the...

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4% during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5% by 2000. Our analysis finds little...

This paper investigates whether returns to schooling differ according to the choice of the measure of earnings and the different periods in which workers are paid (daily, weekly, and monthly). Using comparable data from the Living Standards and Measurement Study (LSMS) for Malawi, Tanzania and...

This paper investigates relative earnings of individuals leaving tertiary education without a degree across 18 European countries employing survey data on adult workers. We find that, on average, university dropouts earn 8% more than those never enrolling into tertiary education, but 25% less...

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

In 2000, the OECD began the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey of the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds. For each survey, Canadian students placed well above the OECD average and remain among the top performers for each domain assessed (reading, math and...

By using a simple (short-cut) method, the private and social rates of return of tertiary and secondary education in Italy between 1989 and 1998 are estimated, as well as the private rates of return for some OECD countries in 1998. The results show that private rates of return, especially for...