This paper examines the outcome of over-skilling and over-education on wages and job satisfaction of full-time employees in Australia between 2001 and 2008. We employ a random effects probit model with Mundlak corrections. We find differences by type of mismatch, education pathway, and gender. We categorise reported mismatches as genuine…

This paper investigates the determinants of grades achieved in maths by first-year students in economics. We use individual administrative data from 1993 to 2005 to fit an educational production function. Our main findings suggest that good secondary school achievements and the type of school attended are significantly associated with maths…

This paper is a macro study on higher education R&D and its impact on productivity growth. I measure the social rate of return on higher education R&D in 17 high-income OECD countries using country level data on the percentage of gross expenditure on R&D performed by higher education, business, and government sectors over the period 1981-2006.…

The number of schools that have access to computers and the Internet has increased rapidly since the beginning of the 1990s. However, evidence of their effectiveness as pedagogical tools to acquire reading and math skills is still the object of debate. We use repeated cross-section data from Brazil to evaluate the effect of the availability of a…

The potentially serious adverse impacts of behavior problems during adolescence on employment outcomes in adulthood provide a key economic rationale for early intervention programs. However, the extent to which lower educational attainment accounts for the total impact of adolescent behavior problems on later employment remains unclear. As an…

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, although many cost function studies have been done in developed countries, there has been no such study for the developing countries such as Vietnam. This paper will make the first attempt at conducting a cost function analysis for Vietnam. Second, it also demonstrates how the results of the cost…

The two-stage least squares approach together with quantile regression analysis is adopted here to estimate the educational production function. Such a methodology is able to capture the extreme behaviors of the two tails of students' performance and the estimation outcomes have important policy implications. Our empirical study is applied to the…

Different stochastic frontier models for panel data are used to estimate education production functions and the efficiency of Finnish general upper secondary schools. Grades in the matriculation examination are used as an output and explained with the comprehensive school grade point average, parental socio-economic background, school resources,…

We examine work participation and schooling for children aged 7-15 using survey data from rural Ethiopia. Bivariate probit and age-adjusted educational attainment equations have been estimated. Male children are found to be more likely to attend school than their female counterparts. "Specialization" in child labour is also found, with females…

We assess the implementation of income contingent loan (ICL) schemes for higher education in a context characterized by two main features: a formerly tuition-free system and a great heterogeneity in the quality and cost of higher education. In that case, ICL implementation leads to a trade-off between increasing "career" equity in terms of…

We examine the effects of a branch campus on the social welfare of the host country and the foreign university. Overall, we find that a branch campus increases both the domestic social welfare (measured by the aggregate student utility) and the tuition revenue of the foreign university. The effect of a branch campus on the brain drain is…

This paper uses a relatively large dataset of the stated academic major preferences of economics majors at a relatively large, not highly selective, public university in the USA to identify the "discouraged-business-majors" (DBMs). The DBM hypothesis addresses the phenomenon where students who are screened out of the business curriculum often…

This paper investigates achievement gaps between low and high socioeconomic students in 19 high-income countries. On average, math scores of students with indicators of high socioeconomic status (SES) are over one standard deviation above those with low SES indicators. The paper estimates the extent to which these achievement gaps can be…

Using data on Swedish university entrants, this study finds that earnings are significantly lower for students who change universities compared to students who do not change. Earnings differences decrease over time and over the earnings distribution. The pattern in the estimates seems consistent with non-transfer students having higher earnings…

The benefits of deferring the payment of higher-education costs are increasingly acknowledged as a way to overcome student-borrowing constraints. Since higher education is a risky investment and students are generally risk averse, the repayment arrangements proposed in the literature frequently include some insurance. In a competitive environment,…