In this paper we consider whether certain countries are particularly adept (or particularly poor) at getting children from disadvantaged homes to study for a bachelor’s degree. A series of university access models are estimated for four English speaking countries (England, Canada, Australia and the United States) which include controls for comparable measures of academic achievement at age 15. ...

Do Guns Displace Books? The Impact of Compulsory Military Service on Educational Attainment Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to humancapital investments. Attend...

The paper examines whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students’ subsequent achievement in education and the take-up by schools of financial support from the government for students. We build a theoretical model to describe the channels through which students’ belief of their ability, as proxied by previous performance in tests, affect their current effort in...

Long-Term Effects of School Size on Students’ Outcomes We estimate the effect of school size on students’ long-term outcomes such as high school completion, being out of the labor market, and earnings at the age of 30. We use rich register data on the entire population of Danish children attending grade 9 in the period 1986-2004. This allows us to compare the results of different fixed effect a...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are two highly respected studies of school pupils’ academic achievement. English policymakers have been disappointed with school children’s performance on these tests, particularly in comparison to the strong results of young people from East Asia. In this paper we provide new insight i...

Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Social Public Procurement Policy: The Case of the Swiss Apprenticeship Training System* In this paper we assess the effectiveness of a social public procurement policy in Switzerland that gives firms that train apprentices a preferential treatment. We estimate the effectiveness of this social procurement policy on a firm’s training participation, train...

We set up an OLG-model, where households choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets. Thereby, the households are exposed to both aggregate wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of taxation and education policy and show that risks can be optimally diversified on...

This study examines parents’ demand for sending their children to a public school located outside their residential school district. Using a unique data set that contains information concerning both inter-district transfers and rejections of transfer applications, I am able to identify which school district characteristics attract the greatest demand for incoming transfers. The analyses reveal ...

Incentives for Teacher Relocation: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy’s implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment tr...

This paper examines whether an expansion in the supply of public preschool crowds out private enrollment, using rich data for municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2006, where federal transfers to local governments change discontinuously with given population thresholds. Results from a regression-discontinuity design reveal that larger federal transfers lead to a significant expansion of local pub...