We study the effect of a compulsory education reform that increased the compulsory level of schooling by two years on the development of cognitive and noncognitive skills and its subsequent impact on long-term labor market performance. We link individual data on cognitive and non-cognitive test scores before and after reform exposure, reform treatment, and labor market outcomes. This allows us ...

T he relationship between birth order and child's human capital is studied in this paper. A Microeconomic model is designed to analyze the intrahousehold behavior on resource allocation and its outcomes for children. Since adding up a child changes the method of intrahousehold resource allocation, the expenditures of investment in child's human capital has been changed too. The aim o...

Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the impact of Ramadan on educational outcomes of Muslim students living in a non-Muslim country. For identification we exploit the fact that the number of Ramadan weeks during the course that we study, varies from year to year, ranging from zero to four. Our main finding is that Ramadan observance has a negative impact on performance; one...

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least abl...

This paper develops and estimates a simple on-the-job search model with skills accumulation. In our model, contrary to previous works, skills are not fully firm-specific nor general but partially transferable. When a worker experience a job transition from firm A to firmB a fraction τ of the skills are lost where τ depends on some distance between firm A and B. In this framework the interaction...

Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family background. Differentiating between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission, we find different effects on the c...

This paper considers education investment and public education policy in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy chooses an education policy in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time-consistent taxation similar to benevolent governments. The two types of government differ in their education policies if highly productive lab...

Parental Education and Wages: Evidence from China Using nationally representative data in China, we find substantial positive partial correlations of both parents’ education with one’s wage. In addition, returns to father’s education are higher in more monopsonistic and less meritocratic labor markets, including non-coastal regions, the state-owned sector, and the early periods of the reform er...

This study examines households’ fertility variations in response to expected permanent shifts in the return to education. Wage premiums measure the return to education because their long-run movements are driven by factors exogenous to the fertility process. The results indicate that high education parents’ fertility responds negatively to changes in the expected return to college and negativel...

The Expansion of Higher Education and Time-Consistent Taxation This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time-consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education. As a result of increasing own income, the ...