The paper aims at studying determinants of schooling in traditional hierarchical societies confronted with an established history of outmigration. In the village, a ruling caste controls local political and religious institutions. For children who do not belong to the ruling caste, migration is...

This paper first draws on a unique data set, hojok (household registers), to estimate numeracy levels in Korea from the period 1550–1630. We add evidence from Japan and China from the early modern period until 1800 to obtain a human capital estimate for East Asia. We find that numeracy was...

This Paper proposes a theoretical framework that combines the role of education as a cultural melting pot with its function as an instrument of human capital accumulation. It highlights the important role of public education in promoting social cohesion: requiring minority parents to pay twice...

This paper estimates the impact of college teaching on students' academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of...

We exploit an incentive change in professional soccer leagues aimed at encouraging more attacking and goal scoring to obtain evidence on the effect of stronger incentives on productive and destructive effort. Using as control the behavior of the same teams in a competition that experienced no...

In this paper we argue that an important source of the recent increase in outsourcing is the computer and information technology revolution, characterized by increased rates of technological change. Our model shows that an increase in the pace of technological change increases outsourcing...

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

We study the relationship between geography and growth. To do so, we first develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. We...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father’s temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labor supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is...