Countries often spend billions on university research. There is growing interest in how to assess whether that money is well spent. Is there an objective way to assess the quality of a nation's world-leading science? I attempt to suggest a method, and illustrate it with modern data on economics....

How should the productivity of research universities be measured? This task is difficult but important. The recent Research Excellence Framework in the UK, which was based on peer review, suggests that there has been a marked improvement in UK academic research in economics and in many other...

I ask generally whether a country can benefit from the temporary importation of human capital, and specifically whether a program that attracts large groups of academic visitors to a distant country benefits it by generating additional scholarly research on local issues. Using the list of...

We verify whether an income support policy for part-time workers in Belgium increases the transition from unemployment to non-subsidised, "regular" employment. Using a sample of 8630 long-term unemployed young women, whose labour market history is observed from 1998 to 2001, we implement the...

This paper investigates pre-teenage effects of the choice of type of non-parental child care at age three (preschool relative to more informal family day care). We exploit a Danish panel data child survey merged with administrative records along with a pseudo-experiment that generates variation...