Three factors help to explain why school enrollments in the Northern United States were higher than those in the South and in most of Europe by 1850. One was affordability: the northern schools had lower direct costs relative to income. The second was the greater autonomy of local governments. The third was the greater diffusion of voting power among the citizenry in much of the North, especially in rural communities. The distribution of local political voice appears to be a robust predictor of tax support and enrollments, both within and between regions. Extra local voice raised tax support without crowding out private support for education.

Human capital has been shown as an important determinant of environmental performance at the firm and province levels. We try to identify the impact of human capital on environmental performance at the country level. To address potential endogeneity and measurement errors regarding human capital, we use the primary school enrollment rate a century ago as an instrument for today’s human capital stock. The instrumental variable estimation, based on a sample of 72 countries, shows that human capital has a statistically significant effect on the Environmental Performance Index, a composite measure of national environmental performance, primarily through improving biodiversity, habitat, and sustainable agriculture, all of which are the indicators related to environmental sustainability. These findings from cross-country analysis are broadly consistent with those of firm-level or province-level studies, emphasizing the role of human capital in enhancing the awareness of and compliance with environmental regulations, thus leading to an improvement in environmental performance.

We examine the effects of the 2011 Korean School-to-Work Programme on the career choices of vocational high school students. To identify the causal impacts, we utilize the difference-in-differences method, comparing vocational high school graduates to academic high school graduates between 2011 and 2012. The results show that the policy increased the employment rate of vocational high school graduates by 36%. The proportion of graduates advancing to postsecondary education decreased by a similar magnitude, implying that the policy indeed altered the career choices of a significant number of vocational high school students, leading them to pursue employment rather than attend college.

What is the effect of private tutoring on study-alone time? Using a novel instrumental variable of provincial regulations on cram school curfew time, we show that private tutoring at cram school increased a student’s time spent on studying alone after school. Our IV analysis of the Korean Time Use Survey data for 2009 and 2014 shows that cram school attendance increased the student’s study-alone time by about an hour on the same day. We find no evidence that private tutoring at home substitutes for cram schooling.