This paper provides a signalling model of endogenous growth in which innate talents and education levels of workers drive the basic scientific knowledge and adoptive knowledge accumulation processes. Whether talented individuals get properly educated and are employed in the appropriate technical...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser-- whether governemnt or taxpayer--appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

In this paper we use a simple model to analyze the forces which determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy which maximizes a social welfare function $U(s,Y)$ which...

Using the NLSY data set, this paper formulates and then empirically estimates the production processes for social, motivational and cognitive skills during early childhood development and the long-term effects of these skills on learning and life-time earnings of an individual. Using these...

This paper examines the impact of job search methods on the output of the job search process in a segmented labor market. Theoretical models of job search, like the widely used search approach, generally contain only one parameter capturing all possible factors affecting the efficiency of...

Our objective is to obtain an accurate estimate of the degree of intergenerational income mobility in Canada. We use income tax information on about 400,000 father-son pairs, and find intergenerational earnings elasticities to be about 0.2. Earnings mobility tends to be slightly greater than...

This paper describes the geographical location and internal mobility of the Mâori ethnic group in New Zealand between 1991 and 2001. It is often suggested that Mâori are less mobile than other ethnic groups because of attachment to particular geographical locations. We compare the mobility of...

We utilize county-level data to explore the roles of different types of human capital accumulation in U.S. growth determination. The data includes over 3,000 cross-sectional observations and 39 demographic control variables. The large number of observations provides enough degrees of freedom to...

The view that the returns to public educational investments are highest for early childhood interventions stems primarily from several influential randomized trials - Abecedarian, Perry, and the Early Training Project - that point to super-normal returns to preschool interventions. This paper...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...