This paper provides evidence of the effect of age at school entry on college admission and earnings. It does so by exploiting a number of features in the application process to one of the major flagship universities in Brazil. By comparing applicants with different ages at school entry depending on whether they were born on December 31 or on January 1, our estimates show that applicants who del...

Absolute Risk Aversion and the Returns to Education Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education in a standard log earnings equation. I find that,...

We estimate the effect of age of school entry on educational outcomes using two different data sets for Germany, sampling pupils at the end of primary school and in the middle of secondary school. Results are obtained based on instrumental variable estimation exploiting the exogenous variation in month of birth. We find robust and significant positive effects on educational outcomes for pupils ...

Using German linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the impact of on-the-job training on wages. The applied estimation technique was fi rst introduced by Leuven and Oosterbeek (2008). The idea is to compare wages of employees who intended to participate in training but did not do so because of a random event with wages of training participants. The estimated wage returns are sta...

Economists generally assume, implicitly, that “the return to schooling” is invariant across local labor markets. We demonstrate that this outcome pertains if and only if preferences are homothetic—a special case that seems unlikely. Our theory predicts that returns to education will instead be relatively low in expensive high-amenity locations. Our analysis of U.S. data provides support for thi...

Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdiction...

Much attention has recently focused on the rapidly rising costs of a college education, and whether the benefits of attending an elite private college have kept pace with the increasing costs. In this paper we analyze whether undergraduate college quality affects the likelihood that an individual attends graduate school. Using data on three cohorts of students from the National Longitudinal Stu...

The Economic Determinants of Ethnic Assimilation Expanding on the concept of ethnic human capital, the paper distinguishes between cultural assimilation compatible with persistent ethnic groups and assimilation through intermarriage and other mechanisms that blur distinctions and lead to the disappearance of ethnic identities. Economic determinants of “successful” and “disadvantaged” group outc...

Close Neighbours Matter: Neighbourhood Effects on Early Performance at School Children’s outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods...

Sexual Orientation, Prejudice and Segregation This paper examines whether gay and lesbian workers sort into tolerant occupations. With information on sexual orientation, prejudice and occupational choice taken from Australian Twin Registers, we find that gays and lesbians shy away from prejudiced occupations. We show that our segregation results are largely driven by those gay and lesbian worke...