We use an admissions lottery to estimate the effect of a non-means tested preschool program on students' long-run earnings, employment, family income, household formation, and geographic mobility. We observe long-run outcomes by linking both admitted and non-admitted individuals to confidential...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

Using the historical random assignment of MBA students to peer groups at an elite business school in the United States, I explore the effect of the gender composition of a student's peers on the gender-wage gap at graduation, the field of study in business school, and on long-term outcomes up to...

Many studies have shown that graduating from school during a recession can have lasting negative effects on labor market outcomes, known as the "scarring effect." This paper focuses on overeducation as a factor contributing to the scarring effect and aims to uncover the mechanism behind it....

Evidence shows college increases earnings, but little causal evidence distinguishes whether these earnings come through human capital gains or from the signal a college degree sends. We use the unique situation created by the First World War, where several cohorts of West Point cadets were...

We study the earnings and employment effects of enrollment in formal adult education in Finland using a combination of matching and panel data methods. We also conduct cost-benefit analyses. The results show that adult education increases earnings and employment both in secondary and higher...

This study replicates and challenges the finding of zero wage returns to compulsory schooling in Germany by Pischke and von Wachter (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90(3) 2008, 592-598), which is unusual in the literature yet widely cited and until now uncontradicted. I document that this...

This paper uses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data linked to administrative data to track the educational and labour market outcomes of young people. Students with lower skills have lower rates of participation in further education. While men with low skills out-earn...

This paper quantifies the earnings premia attained by college graduates with different single and double major combinations per year and in aggregate over an eleven-year period. I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort to produce a multiple regression model. To...

In this paper I investigate the causal returns to education for different educational groups in Germany by employing a new method by Klein and Vella (2010) that bases identification on the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared to IV methods, key advantages of this approach are...