The most painful effect of the Great Recession in European countries has been the surge in unemployment rates during a period that has been characterised by an increase in income inequality and the heterogeneous pattern of this inequality by educational level. Thus, workers with low levels of educational attainment were among the first to lose…

Educational activity among adults is not only a key factor of social development but also one of the most important priorities of public policies. Although large sums have been earmarked and numerous actions undertaken to encourage adult learning, many people remain educationally passive, a particularly acute problem in Poland. We point to the…

The purpose of this study was to explore participation in job-related lifelong learning (LLL) among well-educated mature workers and compare it across four Nordic countries. Although this group generally is very active in LLL, the centrality of knowledge work in society, rapid pace of skills-renewal and rising learning demands for all…

Survey data comparing the life aspirations of three generations of Russians show an increase from the level of the Soviet generation of young people to the perestroika generation, followed by a decline in the generation of young people who were born and grew up in today's "market" Russia. One chief cause of the downward dynamic of their…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of an Italian training program on the re-employment probability of young unemployed workers. The program consists exclusively of workplace training and is coordinated by employment centers, even if it is fully implemented by firms. Design/Methodology/Approach: The authors develop a…

This paper provides empirical evidence of the persistent effect of exposure to political violence on human capital accumulation. I exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the long- and short-term effects of the civil war on educational attainment. Conditional on being exposed to violence, the average person…

The relationship between education and empowerment has been widely debated in development literature. In recent times, social capital and community-centric learning have been increasingly recognized as important variables in the empowerment process. This paper outlines the development of a "Three-dimensional Empowerment Framework", and…

In the contemporary United States, marriage is closely related to money. Men and (perhaps to a lesser extent) women with more education, higher incomes, larger stocks of wealth, and more stable employment are more likely to marry than are people in more precarious economic positions. But is this relationship truly causal? That is, does economic…

Despite the fact that migraine headaches are common and debilitating, little is known about their effect on educational attainment. Using data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate the relationship between migraine headache and three outcomes: high school grade point average, the probability of graduating…

It is well established that workers with more years of education earn higher wages. By establishing a reference or "required" level of education for a worker's occupation, it is possible to decompose an individual's actual level of education into years of required education and years of over-education or under-education relative to that…

While there is some evidence of long-term social benefits from early childhood educational interventions conducted in socially disadvantaged populations in the USA, there is limited evidence of similar benefits in different populations and countries. This study examined a range of social outcomes of adults aged 34-67 years who, between 1940 and…

Since the late 1990s there has been a fundamental shift in the way schooling and even education as a whole is evaluated. From this new perspective the education system would seem to be interpreted as a sub-system of the economic system and thus subservient to it. Decisions on education matters seem to have become determinant for individual…

This article compares the labour market situation of graduates with different types of international background. The authors look at four groups of graduates: immigrants and ethnic Norwegians graduated in Norway and immigrants and ethnic Norwegians graduated abroad. By employing multinomial logistic regression analyses the authors find that ethnic…

The purpose of this paper is to compare the role of human capital accumulation measured by number of years of schooling with the relative contribution of institutional capacity to prosperity. We employ several concepts of institutional quality prevalent in the literature. We discover that developing human capital is as important as superior…

This study analyzes the effects of human, social, and financial capital on children's home environments in the United States and Great Britain by comparing a sample of 5- to 13-year-old children from the United States with a similar sample from Britain. In both countries, the authors find weaker home environments for boys, minority children, and…