Indian Entrepreneurial Success in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using Census data from the three largest developed countries receiving Indian immigrants in the world -- the United States, United Kingdom and Canada -- we examine the performance of Indian entrepreneurs and explanations for their success. We find that business income of Indian entrepreneurs in the United States is substantially higher than the national average and is higher than any other immigrant group. Approximately half of the average difference in income between Indian entrepreneurs and the national average is explained by their high levels of education while industry differences explain an additional 10 percent. In Canada, Indian entrepreneurs have average earnings slightly below the national average but they are more likely to hire employees, as are their counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. The Indian educational advantage is smaller in Canada and the United Kingdom contributing less to their entrepreneurial success

Moving Up a Gear: The Impact of Compressing Instructional Time into Fewer Years of Schooling

Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that compressing the high school track by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by about 10 months. The probability to repeat a grade level in the course of high school increases by 21 percent (3 percentage points), peaking in the final three years before graduation. However, the high school graduation rate is not affected. The results indicate the reform's success in reducing the graduation age, though it stays behind its potential benefits for labour markets and social security schemes because of higher grade repetition rates

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence: the role of instructional quantity and the timing of instruction with respect to age. To identify causal effects, I exploit a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment: between 2001 and 2007, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced by one year in most of Germany's federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. To investigate the impact of this educational change on students' cognitive abilities, I conduct two separate analyses: first, I exploit the variation in the curriculum taught to same-aged students at academic-track high school over time and across states to identify the effect of the increase in instructional time on students' crystallized and fluid intelligence scores. Using rich data on seventeen year-old adolescents from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, the estimates show that fluid intelligence remained unaffected, while crystallized intelligence improved for male students. Second, I compare students' competences in their final year of high school using data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Preliminary results suggest that students affected by the reform catch up with their non-affected counterparts in terms of their competences by the time of graduation. However, they do not provide any evidence for the timing of instruction to matter in cognitive skill formation. Overall, secondary education therefore seems to impact students' cognitive skills in adolescence especially through instructional time and not so much through age-distinct timing of instruction

Indian Entrepreneurial Success in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom

Indian immigrants in the United States and other wealthy countries are successful in entrepreneurship. Using census data from the three largest developed countries in the world receiving Indian immigrants-the United States, United Kingdom and Canada-the authors examine the performance of Indian entrepreneurs and the causes of their success. In the United States, Indian entrepreneurs have average business income that is substantially higher than the national average and is higher than any other immigrant group. High levels of education among Indian immigrants in the United States are responsible for nearly half of the higher level of entrepreneurial earnings while industry differences explain an additional 10 percent. In Canada, Indian entrepreneurs have average earnings slightly below the national average but they are more likely to hire employees, as are their counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. The Indian educational advantage is smaller in Canada and the United Kingdom contributing less to their entrepreneurial success.