Military Conscription and University Enrolment: Evidence from Italy Given that a growing number of countries have abolished or are considering the abolition of military conscription, understanding the consequences of this measure is of increased importance. In this paper we study the effect of the suppression of compulsory military service on university enrolment in Italy using double and tripl...

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers’ performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schoo...

In the face of declining state support, many universities have introduced differential pricing by undergraduate program as an alternative to across-the-board tuition increases. This practice aligns price more closely with instructional costs and students’ ability to pay postgraduation. Exploiting the staggered adoption of these policies across universities, this paper finds that differential pr...

PISA Results: What a Difference Immigration Law Makes The purpose of this article is to evaluate the importance of social class, migration background and command of national languages for the PISA school performance of teenagers living in European countries (France, Finland, Germany, United Kingdom, and Sweden) and traditional countries of immigration (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US)...

Education, Governance and Trade-Related Technology Diffusion in Latin America This paper examines the impact on TFP of North-South trade-related technology diffusion in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). North-South R&D flows are constructed based on industry-specific R&D in the North, North-South trade patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The main findings are: (i) Education ...

This paper studies information frictions between parents and their children and how these affect human capital investments. A random sample of parents was provided detailed, biweekly information about their child’s missed assignments and grades. I find parents have upwardly-biased beliefs about their child’s effort; providing additional information attenuates this bias and improves student achi...

Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximi...

Does Schooling Affect Health Behavior? Evidence from the Educational Expansion in Western Germany During the postwar period German states pursued policies to increase the share of young Germans obtaining a university entrance diploma (Abitur) by building more academic track schools, but the timing of educational expansion differed between states. This creates exogenous variation in the availabi...

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an OLG model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to work and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation-specific human capital. Favorable shifts in the survival probabilities induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ...

Academics and policymakers have shown great interest in cross-national comparisons of intergenerational earnings mobility. However, producing consistent and comparable estimates of earnings mobility is not a trivial task. In most countries researchers are unable to observe earnings information for two generations. They are thus forced to rely upon imputed data instead. This paper builds upon pr...