Using Finnish panel data, we study how entrepreneurs differ from workers in education and income dynamics. We find that workers have higher median income in all educational groups. Without additional controls, entrepreneurs have higher average income with all but undergraduate level of...

The socio-economic gradient in health remains a controversial topic in economics and other social sciences. In this paper we develop a new duration model that allows for unobserved persistent individual-specific health shocks and provides new evidence on the roles of socioeconomic...

This paper uses Italian panel data to analyse transition probabilities at the bottom of the earnings distribution during the 1990s. The analytical framework is characterised by the ability to account for the endogeneity of initial conditions, educational attainment and earnings attrition,...

The world has enjoyed huge improvements in population health during the last half century. But major health problems persist, particularly in tropical countries, which are still struggling with infectious diseases while increasingly having to deal with noncommunicable diseases. Several classic...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure...

This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive...

As credit and insurance markets are imperfect, and given that intra-family transfers, and the way a child uses her time outside school hours, are private information, the second-best policy makes school enrollment compulsory, forces overt child labour below its efficient level (if positive), and...