What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the general question driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wage behavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is evaluated. Based...

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...

The rapid rise in schooling in developing countries in recent decades has been dramatic. However, many cross-country regression analyses of the impact of schooling on economic growth find low and insignificant coefficients. This empirical `puzzle` contrasts with theoretical arguments that...

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the sub-Saharan African country with the largest fraction of tertiary-educated...

We study two platforms competing for members by investing in network quality.  Quality is complementary to the network size: the marginal utility generated by an additional member increases with the network's quality.  Platforms are imperfect substitutes: a share of the potential members are...

This paper analyses the survival of the complete cohort of more than 162,000 limited companies incorporated in Britain in 2001 over the subsequent five-year period.  For this purpose, we estimate firms' hazards of failure and survival functions using nonparametric and semi-parametric...

Social instability is a concept that economists rarely analyse, and yet it can lurk behind much economic policy-making.  China’s leadership has often publicly expressed its concerns to avoid ‘social instability’.  It is viewed as a threat both to the political order and to...

We conduct a field experiment to investigate employers' trust in workers.  A sample of real entrepreneurs and workers from urban Ghana are respectively assigned to the roles of employers and employees.  Employers have the option to hire (trust) an employee, who can in turn choose whether to...

The empirical literature on the economics of happiness has grown rapidly, and much has been learned about the determinants of subjective well-being.  Less attention has been paid to its normative implications.  Taking China as a case study, this paper first summarises empirical results on the...

Height is the result of a complex process of growth that begins at birth and reaches the end in early adulthood.  This paper studies the determinants of height from birth to maturity.  A height production function is specified whose structure allows height to be the result of the accumulation...