We propose a dynastic model in which individuals are born in an educated or uneducated environment that they inherit from their parents. We study the role of social networks on the correlation in the parent-child educational status independent of any parent-child interaction. We show that the...

This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

In May 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centres across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of Ethiopian...

This paper discusses how employment vouchers should depend on age in a simple overlapping generations model in which workers are either young or old. We find that young workers should receive higher vouchers as displacement of the old rises and as the deadweight loss from providing vouchers to...

We develop a model that gives some microfoundation to the impact of residential neighborhood on children’s educational attainment and then test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that, for high-educated parents, the better the quality of the neighborhood in terms of...

In Israel, as in many other countries, a high school matriculation certificate is required by universities and some jobs. In spite of the certificate’s value, Israeli society is marked by vast differences in matriculation rates by region and socioeconomic status. We attempted to increase the...

There is renewed interest in ways to enhance secondary education, especially among disadvantaged students. This study evaluates the short-term effects of a remedial education programme that provided additional instruction to under-performing high school students in Israel. The programme targeted...

This paper explores the optimal design of subsidies for hiring unemployed workers (‘employment vouchers’ for short) in the context of a simple macroeconomic model of the labour market. Focusing on the short-term and long-term effects of the vouchers on employment and unemployment, the...

The paper explores the employment implications of allowing people the opportunity of using a portion of their incapacity benefits to provide employment vouchers for employers that hire them. The analysis indicates that introducing this policy could increase employment, raise the incomes of...

This paper explores the formation of cities through labour specialization, gains to trade, a fixed cost for the transportation network, imperfect competition between firms, and the commuting costs of consumers. The model uses a very general setting, allowing a multidimensional location space and...