Abstract This study estimates the impact of relative age (i.e., the difference in classmates’ ages) on both the speed and quality of individuals’ transition from education to the labour market, and investigates whether and how this impact passes through characteristics of students’ educational careers—topics that have been largely overlooked in prior work. We use rich data pertaining to schooling and to labour market outcomes one year after graduation to conduct instrumental variables analyses. We find that a one-year increase in relative age increases the likelihood of (i) being employed then by 3.5 percentage points (baseline 91.2%), (ii) having a permanent contract by 5.1 percentage points (baseline 42.6%), and (iii) having full-time employment by 6.5 percentage points (baseline 79.5%). These relative age effects are partly mediated by intermediate outcomes such as having had a schooling delay at the age of sixteen or taking on student jobs. The final mediator is particularly notable as no earlier studies examined relative age effects on student employment.

Abstract We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one’s parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we exploit rich longitudinal data on Belgian freshmen students’ residential status and exam scores to control for observed heterogeneity as well as for individual fixed (or random) effects. We find that after correcting for unobserved heterogeneity, the association found in earlier contributions disappears. This finding of no significant impact of living in a student room on exam results is robust for other methods used for correcting endogeneity bias including instrumental variable techniques.

Abstract We study the effects of rent-seeking on economic growth. The starting point is an overlapping generations model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation. In this setting we introduce a source of rent, namely monopolization of one of the sectors of the economy, and agents who are heterogeneous in their (intrinsically useless) rent-seeking ability. Agents can boost their income either by investing in human capital or by capturing a fraction of rent. Monopolization increases the growth rate. The effect of rent-seeking on growth is ambiguous, but it increases wealth inequality.