Education Policy and Equality of Opportunity We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our model predicts that late tracking and a long pre-school cycl...

In this article, the joint use of an income tax and public provision of education as instruments to achieve the government’s distributional objectives is considered. Individuals differ in innate labour productivity and in aptitude to acquire skills through education. Actual labour productivity depends on both innate skill and the amount of education received. Using a generalized version of the ...

Why Are the Returns to Education Higher for Entrepreneurs than for Employees? We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19 waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and taking account of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than for employees (18.3 percent and 9.9 percent, respecti...

One of the federal government’s main elementary and secondary education programs is Title I, which allocates money for compensatory education to school districts based on child poverty. I use sharp changes in per-pupil grant amounts surrounding the release of decennial census data to identify effects of Title I on state and local education revenue, and how much the program ultimately increases ...

The education of the poor and disadvantaged population has been a long-­‐standing challenge to the education system in both developed and developing countries. Although computer-­‐assisted learning (CAL) has been considered one alternative to improve learning outcomes in a cost-­‐effective ...

October 2008 Preliminary version Please do not quote! Abstract. This paper examines the patterns of educational assortative mating in East and West Germany. In the literature it is well known that individuals do not mate randomly according to social and cultural traits. Marrying within a socio-economic group can lead to polarization and exacerbating economic inequality. In the US, there is a co...

This paper incorporates two-stage education in a political economy model to study the endogenous determination of public budget allocation across education stages. With hierarchical education, individuals’ benefits from higher education depend on their qualifications, and congestion arises when higher enrollment lowers schooling quality. In less developed economies, the top class has dominant p...

The Crime Reducing Effect of Education In this paper, we present evidence on empirical connections between crime and education, using various data sources from Britain. A robust finding is that criminal activity is negatively associated with higher levels of education. However, it is essential to ensure that the direction of causation flows from education to crime. Therefore, we identify the ef...

International differences in educational attainment rates affect the volume of trade through several channels. According to the factor proportions model of trade, the ratio of highly educated workers to less educated workers in each country determines the national product mix. In this model, the volume of bilateral trade is decreasing in the similarity of the countries’ factor proportions. On t...