The effect of military service on subsequent earnings has not been taken into account in the decennial debate on the abolition of military conscription in Western Europe. This paper, using a quasi–natural experiment due to the abolition of military conscription in the UK in 1960, provides evidence of the long–term effects of conscription on subsequent earnings. In particular, we explore whether...

The Origins of Intergenerational Associations: Lessons from Swedish Adoption Data We use unique Swedish data to estimate intergenerational associations between adoptees and their biological and adoptive parents. We argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad pre-birth factors, including genes and prenatal environment, and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad post-b...

The budgetary implications of an aging population in the OECD are often considered dire. This study argues that this need not be the case provided that older educated workers are more innovative than their younger counterparts, and that workers with tertiary education stay in the labor force until their 60s. Using a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1870-2009, this paper estimates the ...

The causal relationship between educational investments and student outcomes continues to attract attention. The majority of studies have examined the effectiveness of public school expenditures on student outcomes. This paper attempts to shed light on the impacts of educational inputs by examining a private educational investment—private tutoring that is widely employed by South Korean parents...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners’ significant wage growth is underpinned by the link between ex ante ability, math-heavy college majors and hig...

Although Mexico’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program Oportunidades has increased overall school enrollment, many adolescents do not attend school, especially in urban areas. This paper simulates the effects of changes in program design using a simple parametric method based on a simultaneous probability model of school attendance and child labor. The paper also provides alternative non parametri...

We study the evolution of an educational system founded on a hierarchical di®erentiation between vocational and general education, with vocational playing an inferior role in the society. The dynamics are best summarized by the ratio of the fraction of the population in vocational to that in general education, which we interpret as a measure of the degree of strati ̄cation of the society. We sho...

“Every Catholic Child in a Catholic School”: Historical Resistance to State Schooling, Contemporary Private Competition, and Student Achievement across Countries Nineteenth-Century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling. We show that countries with larger shares of Catholics in 1900 (but without a Catholic state religion) tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even...

Armed Conflict and Schooling: Evidence from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide To examine the impact of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide on children’s schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group’s baseline schooling and exploits variation across provinces in the intensity of ...

This paper examines whether the average level of human capital in a region affects the earnings of an individual residing in that region in a manner that is external to the individual’s own human capital. I find little evidence of an external effect of human capital, which suggests that human capital spillovers of the form postulated by the new growth literature are unlikely to matter much in p...