As Switzerland experiences a severe shortage of nurses, this paper investigates the impact of students' ex ante wage expectations on their choice to pursue a nursing college education. This analysis contributes to a small yet rapidly developing body of literature that uses subjective expectation...

We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student's ordinal rank...

We investigate the impact of student work experience on later hiring chances. To completely rule out potential endogeneity, we present a field experiment in which various forms of student work experience are randomly disclosed by more than 1000 fictitious graduates applying for jobs in Belgium....

Disruptions in family life can take many forms, but all have the potential to impact student learning. With school administrative data matched to birth records, I estimate the effect of unexpected changes in the home environment, or family shocks, on achievement. Identification comes from...

The role of the accumulation of human capital to per capita income growth has been sharply debated among economists and policy makers. One open question of this debate is how to measure human capital. The standard approach is to use the average years of education of the labour force or the...

This paper proposes an approach to identifying the education production function with endogenous inputs, and applies it in the context of part-time employment decisions by UK teenagers in compulsory education. We identify simultaneously the effect of part-time employment and latent endogenous...

There is limited existing evidence justifying the economic case for state education policy. Using newly-developed measures of the human capital of each state that allow for internal migration and foreign immigration, we estimate growth regressions that incorporate worker skills. We find that...

This is a theoretical study of human-capital accumulation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

This paper raises the problem of the optimal allocation of talent in a gendered perspective. It analyses the transition from education to labor market in Italy, and the way in which gender differences emerge early in the labor market career. Our data establish higher grades for females in both...

While uncertainty abounds in almost any decision on investment in schooling, it is mostly ignored in research and virtually absent in labour economics text books. This paper documents the scope for risk, discusses the tough disentanglement of heterogeneity and risk, surveys the analytical...