We use a sharp, exogenous and repeated change in the value of leisure to identify the impact of student effort on educational achievement.  The treatment arises from the partial overlap of the world's major international football tournaments with the exam period in England.  Our data enable a...

We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

In China urban residents have traditionally been protected against labour market competition from rural-urban migrants. Over the period of urban economic reform, rural-urban migration was allowed to increase in order to fill the employment gap as growth of labour demand outstripped that of the...

Turning Europe into a leading `global knowledge-based` economy has become something of an obsession for policy-makers in the EU. From the integrated guidelines of the Lisbon Agenda to the July 2005 announcement of a new scientific European Research Council, considerable effort has been directed...

Social capital is thought to play an economic role in the labour market. It may be particularly pertinent in one that is in transition from an administered to a market-oriented system. One factor that may determine success in the underdeveloped Chinese labour market is thus guanxi, the Chinese...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long-run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. We study a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19...

This paper documents the regional divide in educational facilities between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan between 1947 and 1971. During this period, the total number of primary schools in East Pakistan declined, leading to overcrowding of existing schools and classrooms. On the...

While it might be expected that schooling will depend positively on the economic returns to education (ER) in the local labor market, in fact there is theoretical ambiguity about the sign of the schooling-ER relationship when households are liquidity-constrained. Whether the relationship is...

This is an attempt to view the relationships involving education and income as forming a system, and one that can generate a poverty trap.  The setting is rural China, and the data are from a national household survey for 2002, designed with research hypotheses in mind.  Enrolment is high in...

Econometric analyses of European datasets suggest that income aspirations increase with current income.  This finding is consistent with the adaptation hypothesis - the notion that individual aspirations adjust to reflect personal circumstances and living conditions.  We add to these existing...