We study the effects of grade retention on secondary school performance by considering a change in Colombia's educative legislation. In 2010, the rule that forced schools to retain up to a 5% of students was abolished. Exploiting variation in schools' retention rates in a...

This paper investigates gender-based segregation across different fields of study at the post-secondary level of schooling, and how that affects subsequent labour market outcomes of men and women. Using a nationally representative longitudinal data-set from India, we provide evidence that there...

In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other family inputs – bilingual children achieve different outcomes in language and emotional development. Our data come from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) which allows us to analyze children's language and emotional development in...

Although women earn approximately 50% of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) bachelor's degrees, more than 70% of scientists and engineers are men. We explore a potential determinant of this STEM gender gap using newly collected data on the career trajectories of United States Air...

Based on local policy variation, this paper estimates the causal effect of additional career assistance on educational outcomes for students in Lower Track Secondary Schools in Germany. We find mostly insignificant effects of the treatment on average outcomes, which mask quite heterogeneous...

Most economic investigations of access to education treat an investment in college or university as if it were a financial investment offering a particular expected rate of return. Since the average measured rates of return are quite favourable, other factors such as lack of information,...

This study addresses the question: Are workers who hold a university degree increasingly filling job openings meant for people with lower levels of schooling? It focuses on Portugal, where the higher education system has been expanding at a fast pace and the share of university graduates in...

Wage expectations are important determinants for individual schooling decisions. However, research on individual expectations of students is scarce. The paper presents the Swiss results of a survey that was conducted in 10 European countries. Its main findings are that point estimates of wages...

This paper examines the effects of class size on the decision to stay on in full time schooling at the age of 16 and on wages at later stages in life. Little research exists on the effect of school quality on career decisions, although it has potentially important long term implications. We use...

There is no empirical evidence that trade exposure per se increases child labour. As trade theory and household economics lead us to expect, the cross-country evidence seems to indicate that trade reduces or, at worst, has no significant effect on child labour. Consistently with the theory, a...