This Paper studies the design of education policies in a setting of successive generations with heterogeneous individuals (high and low earning ability). Parents’ investment in education is motivated by warm-glow altruism and determines the probability that a child has high ability. Education...

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 investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (partition vs. primogeniture)....

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late nineteenth century, immediately following the country’s Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over twenty-year sub-samples covering the 1861-1901 period. We...

Evaluations of new infrastructure in developing countries typically focus on direct effects, such as the impact of an electrifification program on household energy use. But if new infrastructure induces people to move into an area, other local publicly provided goods may become congested,...

This paper studies the impact of income inequality on the level of innovative activity in a model where innovations result in quality improvements. The market for quality goods is characterized by a natural oligopoly with two types of consumers – rich and poor. In general, we find that for...

Countries with substantial revenues from renewable resources face a complex range of revenue management issues. What is the optimal time profile of consumption from the revenue, and how much should be saved? Should saving be invested in foreign funds or in the domestic economy? How does...

This paper diagnoses the symptoms of the Dutch disease in a two-sector stochastic endogenous growth model. A productive, low skill-intensive primary sector causes the currency to appreciate in real terms, thus hampering the development of a high skill-intensive secondary sector and thereby...