Viewing 11 posts categorized under Education
October 4, 2024
Caption: Percentage of students that transition to higher education 1 year after completing vocational secondary education. The possession of higher education qualifications is increasingly seen as essential for improving job prospects, safeguarding against unemployment, and securing higher wages. At the same time, a more educated workforce drives the economic and technological advancement of countries. In light of this, successive Portuguese governments have set ambitious targets to widen access to higher education, with specific policies aimed at vocational secondary school students.
August 29, 2024
Learning to read represents a major cognitive achievement for individuals and an amazing evolutionary step for humanity. However, some individuals show significant and persistent problems with reading, placing them at a disadvantage throughout life. This paper analyzes the results of a yearly intensive reading intervention program for 182 second-grade struggling readers. Caption: Heckman curve. Reducing the gap between struggling readers and their classroom peers is a daunting but crucial societal challenge.
February 23, 2023
Cross-country regressions imply that human capital plays a major role in explaining output differences across countries, but may be biased by omitted factors such as the quality of institutions, culture or geography, among others. Within-country individual returns to schooling suggest a smaller role, but exclude any effect of human capital on total factor productivity (TFP). A recent literature links cross-country variation in TFP to differences in the average growth rate of firms, yet little is known about what underlies these differences.
February 6, 2023
Higher education institutions, broadly labelled as ‘universities’, are considered essential actors in the promotion of economic and cultural growth in the modern knowledge society. Often, they are affected by regional stakeholders and are expected to adjust their strategies in order to contribute to technological and economic specialization at the regional level.
Caption: Overall impact of Entrepreneurial University factors on regional competitiveness. A commonly accepted definition of an Entrepreneurial University is that it provides the right environment for researchers to generate, transform and commercialize their knowledge and technology.
June 29, 2022
This paper analyzes the early career dynamics of wages of European college graduates using data from the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society, a retrospective survey interviewing individuals a few years after their graduation in 1999/2000. The sample includes individuals from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK, Portugal and Norway. The paper finds a gender gap of 0.7 percentage points on an average annual raw wage growth over the five-year period after graduation of 6 1/2%.
April 27, 2022
This study investigates preventable financial mistakes by retail investors in the stock market and whether education helps reduce their likelihood.
The paper examines the change in brokers’ commission schedules in the aftermath of the acquisition of Bolsa de Valores de Lisboa e Porto, the Portuguese stock market, by Euronext Group. The acquisition led to significant changes in the structure of brokers’ trading fee schedules penalizing small transactions, which were very common among retail investors prior to the acquisition.
March 30, 2022
Children start school at different stages of their social, emotional, and cognitive development. This paper investigates the effect of being one year older among peers on a series of relevant outcomes, exploiting differences in school starting age, using administrative records of every public-school student in Portugal.
The paper shows that starting school 1-year later leads to significantly better performances in Math and Language exams in fourth, sixth and ninth grade. These differences mostly reflect cognitive maturity gaps, typical of children this age.
December 14, 2021
What type of education gives the best preparation for the labour market? Vocational education, where you learn the skills for specific occupations? Or a more general education, advancing intellectual and cultural development? It’s an old question in the economics of education literature. The common presumption is that vocational education gives an initial advantage, as the graduate has been trained for specific jobs, and can perform required tasks right-away, but that the general graduate is better prepared for future changes in the labour market, as broader intellectual skills facilitate learning new tasks.
August 30, 2021
Reducing early school leaving, defined as leaving education with at most lower secondary schooling, is generally considered to be one of the top priorities of educational policy due to its significant social and economic costs. Increasing the Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) leaving age is a policy that has typically been used to address this concern. The effects of the policy on students’ educational outcomes are still unclear, with the literature identifying mixed effects both on graduation probabilities and school track choices.
March 25, 2020
This paper investigates the impact of PhD funding on the time to PhD completion, using data of PhD holders working in Portugal. Time to PhD completion has been a major cause for concern for research funding agencies, universities, academics, and doctoral students facing increasingly constrained labor markets, particularly in academia. The Higher Education Funding Council for England reported that, in 2013, around 73% of those starting Ph.Ds. in 2010/11 were projected to take 7 years to receive the degree, while in the USA all fields of knowledge reported median times of more than 6 years to complete the Ph.
December 3, 2019
In Portugal, in 1940, only 40% of the population knew how to read. The causes of this backwardness, as well as the the rapid increase of literacy rates in the subsequent decades have been the focus of considerable research, and some controversy.
This paper measures the contribution of the increase in the number of primary schools since the 1940s to the increase in school enrolment and literacy rates by the beginning of the 60s.