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 human-capital investments. Attending university, however, might open the possibility to avoid the draft, leading to an incre...

Utilizing the National Educational Longitudinal Study data, this paper examines the role of pre-market cognitive and noncognitive abilities, as well as schooling inputs, on young men’s earnings. In addition to the conditional mean, we estimate the impacts over the earnings distribution using recently developed (instrumental) quantile regression techniques. Our results show that noncognitive abi...

Compulsory military service is expected to have a negative impact on the demand for higher education through its effect on the returns to human capital investments. This latter impact is due to, among others, skill atrophy (i.e., the depreciation of human capital learned before military service), the acquisition of skills not relevant for the civilian labor market and the associated time lost d...

Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm? Instrumental Variable Estimates of Educational Effects of Age of School Entry in Germany We estimate the effect of age of school entry on educational attainment using three different data sets for Germany, sampling pupils at the end of primary school, in the middle of secondary school and several years after secondary school. Results are obtained based on ins...

The economic consequences of large-scale government investments in education depend on the general equilibrium (GE) effects in both the labor market and the education sector. I develop a general equilibrium model and derive sufficient statistics that capture the consequences of such massive countrywide schooling initiatives. I provide unbiased estimates of the sufficient statistics using a Regr...

China’s college admission rose from one million in 1998 to seven million in 2009, and associated with the expansion is the declining college premium for young workers. However, the college premium for senior workers increased in the same period. We show that the rising demand for skilled workers is the driving force. To explain this, we build a general equilibrium theory that considers two dime...

Utilizing parametric and nonparametric techniques, we assess the role of a heretofore relatively unexplored ‘input’ in the educational process, homework, on academic achievement. Our results indicate that homework is an important determinant of student test scores. Relative to more standard spending related measures, extra homework has a larger and more significant impact on test scores. Howeve...

The Effects of School Libraries on Language Skills: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in India We conduct a randomized controlled trial of an Indian school library program. Overall, the program had no impact on students’ scores on a language skills test administered after 16 months. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects larger than 0.053 and 0.037 standard deviati...

In this paper I present a dynamic structural model of girls’ schooling choices and estimate it using the Mexican PROGRESA database. This structural approach allows evaluating the effectiveness of several policies to increase school reentry rates for girls in low-income households. To increase school attendance among poor children in developing countries, policy makers have implemented condition...

This paper analyses a political force that can cause an initial expansion of public spending on higher education and an ensuing decline in subsidies per student: the increase in the number, and thus voting power, of skilled parents. The rise of the skilled class leads to a majority for an initial expansion of public education spending. This expansion further boosts the number of skilled parents...