This paper reviews the origins of the 2 per percent rule, arguing that existing evidence for the rule is not as strong as is often supposed and that in any case it can be a misleading guide to the payoff period in policy applications. In the context of a postulated change in the rate of increase...

This paper considers educational investment, wages and hours of market work in an imperfectly competitive labour market with heterogeneous workers and home production. It investigates the degree to which there might be both underemployment in the labour market and underinvestment in education. A...

This paper uses data on a sample of Australian teenagers to test for neighbourhood effects on school dropout rates. The data allows us to test for neighbourhood effects at two different spatial scales. We find that educational composition of the larger neighbourhood can influence the dropout...

Children who grow up in deprived neighborhoods underperform at school and later in life but whether there is a causal link remains contested. This study estimates the short-term effect of very deprived neighborhoods, characterized by a high density of social housing, on the educational...