Social Class and Undergraduate Degree Subject in the UK Although past research has found strong social class effects on the decision to undertake higher education in the UK, there is only sparse empirical work investigating social class influences on the choice of degree subject at the undergraduate level. Using Universities’ Statistical Record data for the period 1981-1991, we find no social c...

Using UNESCO’s recent data, the effects of a country’s income and ‘tropicality’ on ‘school life expectancy’ are explored. While the effect of income is, as expected, positive and substantial, the distance from the equator, which is a measure of the country’s tropicality, is also important. Two additional points are noted. First, the effect of tropicality, relative to that of income, is larger i...

We provide a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. We assume that parents maximize the full income of their children and that males have an additional income, independently of education. This additional income biases preferences towards sons and implies that females have relative advantage in producing income through education. When the returns to human cap...

Educational Achievement in English-Speaking Countries: Do Different Surveys Tell the Same Story? International surveys of educational achievement are typically analysed in isolation from each other with no indication as to whether new results confirm or contradict those from earlier surveys. The paper pulls together results from four surveys to compare average levels of achievement, inequality ...

In this paper, we examine the role of impatience in the formation of human capital – arguably the most important investment decision individuals make during their lifetimes. We pay particular attention to a set of investment behaviors that cannot be explained solely by variation in exponential discount rates. Using data from the NLSY and a straightforward measure of impatience, we find that imp...

This paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households with adolescent children in urban Brazil. Parents in our study were being paid large monthly transfers by the local government conditional upon their children attending school. We elicit parents’ incentivized choices between such conditional monthly payments and guaranteed, unconditional monthly payments of varying re...

This paper investigates differences across UK universities in 1993 life sciences students’ degree performance using individuallevel data from the Universities’ Statistical Record (USR). Differences across universities are analysed by specifying and estimating a subject-specific educational production function. Even after including a wide range of controls for the quality of students, significan...

Leadership Skills and Wages American business seems to be infatuated with its workers’ “leadership” skills. Is there such a thing, and is it rewarded in labor markets? Using the Project Talent, NLS72 and High School and Beyond datasets, we show that men who occupied leadership positions in high school earn more as adults, even when cognitive skills are held constant. The pure leadership-wage ef...

One of the many changes in India since economic liberalisation began in 1991 is the increased use of private schooling. There has been a growing body of literature to assess whether this is a positive trend and to evaluate the effects on child achievement levels. The challenge is to identify the true private school effect on achievement, isolating the effect of the schools themselves from other...

In this paper, we propose two one-to-all optimal broadcasting algorithms in incomplete star graphs. A n incomplete star graph with N nodes, where (n l ) ! < N < n! , is a subgraph of an n-star. Using a routing scheme to transmit a message to each substar composed of the incomplete star, our proposed broadcasting algorithm is optimal in O(n1ogn) on the single-port communication model. While broa...