While vocational education is meant to provide occupational-specific skills that are directly employable, their returns may be limited in fast-changing economies. Conversely, general education should provide learning skills, but these may have little value at low levels of education. This paper...

How did the Great Recession affect the college degree field choices? Utilizing the geographic variation in the severity of the recession in the US, I answer this question using the differences-in-differences and synthetic controls approaches. I find that the Great Recession affected...

I use the method introduced by Gottschalk and Hansen (2003) to analyze the rate of overeducation among workers with exactly a college degree between 2006 and 2013. To my knowledge, this is the first study to use this method to analyze trends in overeducation during the great recession in the...

Compulsory schooling laws are a common policy tool to achieve greater participation in education, particularly from marginalized groups. Raising the compulsory schooling requirement forces students to remain in school which, on balance, is good for them in terms of labor market outcomes such as...

Non-cognitive skills are important predictors of success on the labour market and in many areas of economic and social life. This paper explores the current literature on the economics of non-cognitive skill formation and the most important explanatory factors behind the recent boost of the...

This paper re-examines the wage returns to the 1972 Raising of the School Leaving Age (RoSLA) in England and Wales using a high-quality administrative panel dataset covering the relevant cohorts for almost 40 years of their labour market careers. With best practice regression discontinuity...

We assess, via an experiment across 207 secondary schools, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper...

Institutions of the liberal democracies of the developed Western world are increasingly insufficient to deal with the ever worsening of social problems associated with technological progress, the rapid economic transformation of the economy, the demographic issues and the acceleration of...

This paper analyzes the effect of alternative transition paths after grade 9 of German lower secondary school on vocational training. Using a selection-on-observables approach I show that a delayed transition into vocational training after lower track secondary school is not a disadvantage...