Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central...

The paper investigates the relationship between tax revenues and literacy level, using a panel-model approach. The dataset covers the period 1996 to 2010 and includes 123 countries. The estimations suggest that the assumed function is nonlinear, with inverted-U and U-shaped curves. More...

The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

East Asian students regularly take top positions in international league tables of educational performance. Using internationally comparable student-level data, I estimate how family background and schooling policies affect student performance in five high-performing East Asian economies. Family...

It is a widely held belief that foreign direct investment (FDI) has a positive effect on economic growth. We test this hypothesis by performing convergence regressions derived from a model of endogenous technological change. We estimate the rate of growth in per-capita income, relative to the...

The slow recovery following the 2008/2009 recession has led to renewed interest in the question whether deep recessions lower real GDP permanently or whether we can expect a rebound to earlier trend levels. Using a recent quantile autoregression unit root test we check whether shocks to real GDP...

Labour productivity distribution (dispersion) is studied both theoretically and empirically. Superstatistics is presented as a natural theoretical framework for productivity. The demand index ê is proposed within this framework as a new business index. Japanese productivity data covering...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of empirical cross-country growth literature. The paper begins with describing the basic framework used in recent empirical cross-country growth research. Even though this literature was mainly inspired by endogenous growth theories, the...