This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale government initiative (NPEGEL/KGBV) that provided earmarked funds for addressing girls' special needs to public schools in rural India. Our empirical strategy exploits local variation in program eligibility around a threshold based on the...

Why do public-sector workers receive so much of their compensation in the form of pensions and other benefits? This paper presents a political economy model in which politicians compete for taxpayers' ’and government employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot...

Immigration is an important problem in many societies, and it has wide-ranging effects on the educational systems of host countries. There is a now a large empirical literature, but very little theoretical work on this topic. We introduce a model of family immigration in a frame- work where...

This document is a report prepared for for the DG for Employment and Social Affairs of the European Commission. It surveys the available evidence on the contribution of investment in human capital to aggregate productivity growth and on its impact on wages and other labour outcomes at the...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term educational and employment impacts of an afterschool program that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards with the objective to improve...

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individual performance and on individual affective response, when agents are rewarded according to their absolute performance. In a laboratory set-up, agents perform a real effort task and when receiving...

This report is an extension and partial update of de la Fuente and Ciccone (2002). It constructs estimates of the private and social rates of return on schooling for fourteen EU countries using microeconometric estimates of Mincerian wage equations, the results of crosscountry growth regressions...

This paper is the first to use a randomized trial in the US to analyze the short- and long-term impacts of an afterschool program that offered disadvantaged high-school youth: mentoring, educational services, and financial rewards to attend program activities, complete high-school and enroll in...

In this paper we attempt to describe the general picture reasons behind the world population explosion during the 20th century. In general we comment that if, according to some, at the end of the 20th century there were too many people, this was has a consequence of scientific innovation,...

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance, when individuals are rewarded according to their absolute performance. A natural experiment that took place in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effect in a real-effort setting. For...