Evidence shows that the allocation of talented people is not neutral for growth. Thus, a country with a large population of law concentrators tends to develop rent-seeking activities that reduce growth. A country with a large population of engineers tends to foster innovation and strengthen...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inherited humain capital is a powerful vector of inequality formation and persistence, irrespective of its links with financial wealth endowment. This paper argues that the agents who inherit a low level of human capital bear a greater utility...

The determinants of self-employment are widely studied in the economic literature in recent twenty years. However, in the case of Vietnam where self-employed population takes an important proportion in workforce, it remains an under researched area. By using the data from the Vietnam Household...

We model a successive-generation economy in which parents, motivated by family altruism, decide to finance or not their offspring's human capital accumulation on the basis of their altruistic motive, their own income and the equilibrium ratio between skilled labor and unskilled labor wages. The...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non-monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by building a...

We test the wealth maximization theory of quitting behavior on the German Socioeconomic Panel (1985-2003). With the interpretation of job satisfaction as an expression of the experienced preference for the present job against available alternatives, the propensity to stay in the present job is...

We emphasize the major influences of experienced utility gaps or regret, i.e. the difference between what happened and what might have happened, on job satisfaction. The main prediction that we test is that job satisfaction correlates with the wage gaps experienced in the past and present,...

This paper shows that utility differences between the self-employed and the employees increase with financial development. This effect is not explained by increased profits but by an increased value of non- monetary benefits, in particular job independence. We interpret these findings by...

This paper uses repeated cross-section data ISSP data from 1989, 1997 and 2005 to consider movements in job quality. It is first underlined that not having a job when you want one is a major source of low well-being. Second, job values have remained fairly stable over time, although workers seem...