This paper examines the role of religious denomination for human capital formation. We employ a unique data set which covers, inter alia, information on numerous measures of school inputs in 169 Swiss districts for the years 1871/72, 1881/82 and 1894/95, marks from pedagogical examinations of...

The number of tertiary students enrolled outside their home country has almost doubled in the last decade. In higher education systems that are partly tax-funded, a country’s labor force might not be willing to subsidize the education of foreign students who can be expected to work abroad...

Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show...

Empirical research has given cause to fear that the demographic ageing in industrialized countries is likely to exert a negative impact on educational spending. These papers have linked the share of the elderly with the per capita or per pupil spending on education at the local, state-wide or...

This study uses survey data to investigate attitudes among Swiss voters to different models offering more freedom of choice in the educational system. The findings indicate clear opposition to the use of taxpayer money to fund private schools, while free choice between public schools seems to...

Religious participation is much more widespread in the United States than in Europe, while Europeans tend to view sects more suspiciously than Americans. We propose an explanation for these patterns without assuming differences in preferences or market fundamentals. Religious markets may have...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the sustainability of public debt in Italy during the last 150 years (1861-2010) by employing a database containing several statistical novelties: new time series estimates of public debt and GDP (respectively Bank of Italy and Baffigi, 2011) and an original...

This paper empirically studies the effects of fiscal policy shocks on private consumption. Further, it tries to determine if the level of government bond yield and the unemployment rate affect that relationship. We use yearly data between 1970 and 2000 for thirty-eight countries, of which half...

We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. Starting with the seminal paper of Robert Barro (1990) we show that an understanding of the core results of the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study...