Using US survey data (NLSY) and Swedish register data the relationship between returns to schooling and ability is estimated separately for each country. A significant and positive relationship is found for Sweden, but not for US. The purpose of this study is to propose an explanation to why such differences might occur. While many studies have focused on whether credit constraints results in i...

Most empirical investigations of the effects of cognitive skills assume that they are produced by schooling, and that schooling is exogenous. Drawing on a rich longitudinal data set to estimate production functions for adult reading-comprehension cognitive skills and adult nonverbal cognitive skills, we find that (1) Schooling attainment has a significant and substantial effect on adult reading...

Life Expectancy, Schooling, and Lifetime Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence Revisited This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of life expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. The results of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specific survival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not a necessary, nor a sufficient, condit...

Educational attainment increased sharply during the first part of the 20th century as compulsory schooling laws became more stringent and school quality greatly improved. Since prior research finds that school quality gains contributed to increased education levels during this period, causal estimates of the returns to schooling which use schooling laws as instruments but ignore the contemporan...

Schooling is typically found to be highly correlated with individual earnings in African countries. However, African firm or sector level studies have failed to identify a similarly strong effect for average worker schooling levels on productivity. This has been interpreted as evidence that schooling does not increase productivity levels, but may also indicate that the schooling effect cannot b...

Does Education Matter for Economic Growth? Empirical growth regressions typically include mean years of schooling as a proxy for human capital. However, empirical research often finds that the sign and significance of schooling depends on the sample of observations or the specification of the model. We use a nonparametric local-linear regression estimator and a nonparametric variable relevance ...

Many existing cross -country analyses of the impact of schooling on growth find low economic returns to schooling, with the coefficient estimates being sensitive to modelling approach and sample selection. This paper argues that coefficient instability is to be expected when regression samples include countries that vary greatly in their ability to use schooling productively. Data on corruption...

We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling due to tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in the schooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more schooling-intensive industries played a less important role. To try and understand this finding theoretically, we...

We estimate a …nite mixture dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the log wage regression function is set in a random coe¢ cient framework. We also analyze the determinants of 3 counterfactual experiments (a college attendance subsidy, a high school graduation subsidy and an overall decrease in the rate of time preference) and examine a proposition often claimed in the “Aver...