We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

This paper provides an additional channel through which inequality may influence growth, when labor migration is taken into account. In fact, we show that human capital distribution is crucial to determine whether allowing migration of the most skilled workers from a developing country may be...

Les travailleurs bénéficient de performances différentes sur le marché du travail en fonction de leur âge : le taux d'emploi exhibe une trajectoire en cloche en fonction de l'âge, tandis que le taux de chômage est continuellement décroissant. Au cours des dernières décennies, le taux...

Employers and job seekers rely extensively on job informational networks to fill vacancies or to find a job. The widespread use of job contacts to find work has been largely associated with labor outcomes, such as finding a job or even affecting wages. Some scholars have claimed that informal...

In this paper we estimate the effect of teachers’ wages on students’ achievement in a developing country. We use test scores of pupils enrolled in the 8th grade of primary school, surveyed in 2001 in Brazil. We regress individual student test scores on gross monthly teacher wages allowing...

Like active labour market programmes (ALPMs), grade repetition could generate two types of effects. Better/worse outcomes due to programme participation (i.e. the fact that pupils repeat a particular grade). This is what the existing literature on grade repetition has focused on. Another...

This paper evaluates the effects of grade retention on attainment by exploiting a reform introduced in 2001 in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium whereby the possibility of grade retention in grade 7 was reintroduced. It uses the Synthetic Control Method to identify the best possible...

Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion stipulates that under total utilitarianism, it might be optimal to choose increasing population size while consumption per capita goes to zero. We evaluate this claim within a canonical AK model with endogenous fertility and a reduced form relationship between...

Aging of the population will affect the growth path of all countries. To assess the historical and future importance of this claim we use two popular approaches and evaluate their merits and disadvantages by confronting them to Swedish data. We first stimulate an endogenous growth. Rising...