This paper is motivated by the fact that nearly half of U.S. college students drop out without earning a bachelor’s degree. Its objective is to quantify how much uncertainty college entrants face about their graduation outcomes. To do so, we develop a quantitative model of college choice. The innovation is to model in detail how students progress towards a college degree. The model is calibrate...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants’ economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social security system and detailed telephone surveys to examine the effects of the intervention on maternal...

In a recent, and widely cited, paper, Ashenfelter & Krueger (1994) use a new sample of identical twins to investigate the contribution of genetic ability to the observed cross-sectional return to schooling. This paper re-examines Ashenfelter & Krueger’s estimates using three additional years of the same twins survey. I find that the return to schooling among identical twins is about 10% per yea...

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to 2568 graduates from UK universities in 1993 in order to assess teaching efficiency. Following a methodology developed by Thanassoulis & Portela (2002), each individual’s efficiency is decomposed into two components: one attributable to the university at which the student studied, and the other attributable to the student himself. From the former com...

The Scarring Effects of Unemployment, Low Pay and Skills Under-utilisation in Australia Compared There is a substantial literature on the scarring effects of unemployment on future employment prospects and a smaller one on the scarring effects of low pay, but the possibility that skills mismatch in the form of skills under-utilisation, may also have similar detrimental effects, has not previous...

Population-based data on myocardial infarction rates in the Islamic Republic of Iran have not been reported on a national or provincial scale. In a cross-sectional study, data were collected on 20 750 new cases of myocardial infarction (ICD10 codes I21-22) admitted to hospitals and registered by the Iranian Myocardial Infarction Registry in 2012. The crude and age-adjusted incidence for the 31 ...

This paper examines the labor market value of the GED for females, questioning two implicit assumptions that have been employed in earlier studies. We show that providing access to work experience may be a critical mechanism through which education credentials impart labor market value and that the labor market value of the GED credential depends on the skills with which dropouts left school. O...

A widely-cited result in the education production function literature is that the level of measured school inputs (e.g., student–teacher ratio or starting teacher salary) is not associated with differences in student achievement, all else equal. I argue that this result may be attributable in part to the restrictive functional form assumptions used in the existing literature. I use detailed nat...

This paper evaluates the effects of two subsidy schemes targeted at disadvantaged students in the Netherlands. The first scheme gives schools with at least 70 percent minority students extra funding for personnel. The second scheme gives schools with at least 70 percent students from different disadvantaged groups extra funding for computers and for language materials. The cutoffs at 70 percent...

With few exceptions, the empirical literature on foreign direct investment (FDI) continues to be gender-blind. This paper contributes to filling this gap by assessing the importance of gender inequality in education as a determinant of FDI. We estimate a standard gravity model on bilateral FDI flows which is augmented by educational variables, including different measures of gender inequality i...