Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the impact of Ramadan on educational outcomes of Muslim students living in a non-Muslim country. For identification we exploit the fact that the number of Ramadan weeks during the course that we study, varies from year to year, ranging from zero to four. Our main finding is that Ramadan observance has a negative impact on performance; one...

Does Military Draft Discourage Enrollment in Higher Education? Evidence from OECD Countries Using data from 1960-2000 for OECD countries, we analyze the impact of compulsory military service on the demand for higher education, measured by students enrolled in tertiary education as a share of the working-age population. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that military draft has a negat...

The literature on educational standards suggests that an increase in graduation requirements heightens inequality, since achievement rises only for the best students. The paper derives a different conclusion based on a model featuring workers with heterogeneous abilities. Higher educational standards, while increasing inequality, can increase the earnings of both the most able and the least abl...

This paper develops and estimates a simple on-the-job search model with skills accumulation. In our model, contrary to previous works, skills are not fully firm-specific nor general but partially transferable. When a worker experience a job transition from firm A to firmB a fraction τ of the skills are lost where τ depends on some distance between firm A and B. In this framework the interaction...

This paper investigates the effect of education and the role of technical progress on economic growth in Taiwan over the 1965–2000 period. A structural earnings function and indicator for average schooling years are applied to a measure of education, and a transcendental production function is used in the model. Findings reveal that education has a positive and significant effect on growth, but...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family background is a strong predictor of student performance in South Korea and Singapore, while Hong Kon...

The methods used in most SAT validity studies cannot be justified by any sample selection assumptions and are uninformative about the source of the SAT’s predictive power. A new omitted variables estimator is proposed; plausibly consistent estimates of the SAT’s contribution to predictions of University of California freshman grade point averages are about 20% smaller than the usual methods imp...

We analyse the initial impact of a major school admission reform in Brighton and Hove. The new system incorporated a lottery for oversubscribed places and new catchment areas. We examine the post-reform changes in school composition. We locate the major winners and losers in terms of the quality of school attended. We match similar cities and conduct a difference-in-difference analysis of the p...

The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximize its net benefits. In the jointly determined equilibrium, school...

Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family background. Differentiating between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission, we find different effects on the c...