The paper investigates whether returns to schooling in Ethiopia vary across the wages distribution of individuals. To do so it adopts an instrumental variables quantile regression framework that allows for both endogeneity of schooling resulting from unmeasured ability, and possible heterogeneity in the impact of schooling. The empirical estimates indicate that education contributes more to the...

Recent media attention has focused on the low ranking of Ireland in a major international study on literacy. In this paper we examine the dataset used in these studies to consider the reason behind the low ranking. We find significant evidence that the underlying reason for this is the low level of formal schooling of older individuals, possibly due to the lack of free secondary schooling. More...

This paper examines the family income–college enrolment relationship and the evidence on credit constraints in post-secondary schooling. We distinguish short run liquidity constraints from the long term factors that promote cognitive and noncognitive ability. Long run factors crystallised in ability are the major determinants of the family income schooling relationship, although there is some e...

Supreme Court Justices' uniform professional backgrounds have drawn increasing criticism. Yet it is unclear how diverse professional training would affect the Court's decisions. This Article offers the first empirical analysis of how Justices with diverse professional training vote: It examines a unique period when Justices with formal legal education sat with Justices who entered the professio...

Long considered a laggard in guaranteeing an adequate level of social welfare, the United States has nevertheless been a leader in providing its citizens with open access to higher education. The median number of grades completed in this country has risen from 8.6 for those born in the first five years of the century to 12.8 for persons born at mid-century (Robert Mare, Focus, 3:2). And around ...

In this paper, a job matching model is constructed to analyze education demand. It is assumed that schooling raises a worker’s likelihood of a good match, by helping him to learn what kind of jobs he is likely to fit. It is shown that there is a close relationship between education demand and job mobility.

Using empirical methods, this paper examines household schooling and child labor decisions in rural Bangladesh. The results suggest the following: poverty and low parental education are associated with lower schooling and greater child labor; asset-owning households are more likely to have children combine child labor with schooling; households choose the same activity for all children within t...

This article examines the “why” and “what” of curriculum inquiry from the perspective of the practical in Schwab’s (1969/1978a) paper. It critically scrutinizes the state of curriculum inquiry in China and in North America. The central argument is that curriculum inquiry is a practical undertaking centrally concerned with the practice or inner work of schooling within the societal, institutiona...

We use unique data to estimate the determinants of cognitive ability among 14 to 17 year olds in Senegal. Unlike standard school-based samples, tests were administered to current students as well as to children no longer—or never—enrolled. Years of schooling strongly affects cognitive skills, but conditional on years of school, parental education and household wealth, as well as local public sc...