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Using World Values Survey data from 55 countries, this paper provides detailed insights into the characteristics of people who place a high value on education – and into the characteristics of those who don't. It finds that attitudes toward education vary across the following characteristics: educational attainment, income, social class, political position, postmaterialist values, religion, sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, number of children, family values and employment status. Countries' average GDP per capita affects people's views of education too. Whereas some results are in line with theoretical expectations and previous empirical research, others are surprising.

SummaryThis paper empirically studies the human capital effects of grammatical rules that permit speakers to drop a personal pronoun when used as a subject of a sentence. By de‐emphasizing the significance of the individual, such languages may perpetuate ancient values and norms that give primacy to the collective, inducing governments and families to invest relatively little in education because education usually increases the individual's independence from both the state and the family and may thus reduce the individual's commitment to these institutions. Carrying out both an individual‐level and a country‐level analysis, the paper indeed finds negative effects of pronoun‐drop languages. The individual‐level analysis uses data on 114,894 individuals from 75 countries over 1999‐2014. It establishes that speakers of such languages have a lower probability of having completed secondary or tertiary education, compared with speakers of languages that do not allow pronoun drop. The country‐level analysis uses data from 101 countries over 1972‐2012. Consistent with the individual‐level analysis, it finds that countries where the dominant languages permit pronoun drop have lower secondary school enrollment rates. In both cases, the magnitude of the effect is substantial, particularly among females.

From its beginning 500 years ago, Protestantism has been advocating and actively pursuing the expansion of schooling, including the schooling of girls. In many countries, it has thus helped to create a cultural heritage that puts a high value on education and schooling. This paper provides evidence that Protestantism's historical legacy has an enduring effect. Using data on 147 countries, it finds that countries with larger Protestant population shares in 1900 had higher secondary school enrollment rates over 1975-2010, including among girls. The magnitude of the effect is small though. Using Protestant population shares over 1975-2010, the paper also shows that Protestantism's influence on schooling has diminished and that contemporary Protestantism, in contrast to historical Protestantism, does not affect schooling. The regression analysis accounts for numerous other determinants of schooling.

AbstractUsing data from 1972 to 2011 on 109 countries, this paper empirically studies the impact of economic freedom on human capital investment. Enrollment in secondary education is used as a proxy for such investments. Controlling for a large number of other determinants of education, it finds that, over the sample period, economic freedom had a substantial positive effect. This is probably because more economic freedom increases the return on investing in human capital, enables people to keep a larger share of the return, and, by facilitating the operation of credit markets, makes it easier for them to undertake such investments in the first place.

SummaryBoth Spanish and French colonial education included several features that restricted education. Many of them persisted long after independence. Against this background, this paper econometrically studies whether in the recent past the colonial legacy still affected schooling in the ex‐colonies of these two former colonial powers – and, for comparison, in the ex‐colonies of Britain, the third of the former big three colonial powers. Using a large sample of countries and numerous controls, it finds substantial negative effects on both secondary enrollment and average years of schooling in former French and, especially, in former Spanish colonies. The negative effects on females are particularly large. By contrast, there are no effects in former British colonies.