Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labor, education, and saving, efficient education policy is characterized for a Ramsey-like scenario in which the government is constrained to use linear instruments. It is shown that education should be effectively subsidized if, and only...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient to deviate from Ramsey’s Rule and to distort qualified labour less than nonqualified labour. The result holds for arbitrary utility and learning functions. Efficient...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We...

This paper studies second best policies for education, saving, and labour in an OLG model in which endogenous growth results from human capital accumulation. Government expenditures have to be financed by linear instruments so that growth equilibria are inefficient. The inefficiency is...

The paper studies the effect that skilled labour mobility has on efficient education policy. The model is one of two periods in which a representative taxpayer decides on labour, education, and saving. The government can only use linear tax and subsidy instruments. It is shown that the mobility...

We consider a bargaining model in which husband and wife decide on the allocation of time and disposable income. Since her bargaining power would go down otherwise more strongly, the wife agrees to have a child only if the husband also leaves the labor market for a while. The daddy months...

This paper provides a unified treatment of externalities associated with fertility and human capital accumulation as they relate to pension systems. It considers as overlapping generations model in which every generation consists of high earners and low earners with the proportion of types being...

What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that...

What is the role of politics in shaping attitudes about appropriate roles for women in the family and the compatibility of work and motherhood? In this paper we argue that the German separation and later reunification produced a natural experiment to address this question. During the divided...

Many governments have banned strikes in public transportation. Whether this can be justified depends on whether strikes endanger public safety or health. We use time-series and cross-sectional variation in powerful registry data to quantify the effects of public transit strikes on urban...