This chapter reviews the recent debate about the role of social capital in economics. We argue that all the difficulties this concept has encountered in economics are due to a vague and excessively broad definition. For this reason, we restrict social capital to the set of values and beliefs...

Traditional human capital theory emphasizes a worker's investment in knowledge. However, when a worker is faced with day-to-day problems on the job, the solutions to the problems often require more knowledge from a team of experts within the firm. When a worker taps into the knowledge of...

The United States led all other nations in the development of universal and publicly-funded secondary school education and much of the growth occurred from 1910 to 1940. The focus here is on the reasons for the high school movement' in American generally and why it occurred so early and swiftly...

We develop a competitive model of trade between countries with similar aggregate factor endowments. The trade pattern reflects differences in the distribution of talent across the labor forces of the two countries. The country with a relatively homogenous population exports the good produced by...

International trade theory is a general-equilibrium discipline, yet most of the standard portfolio of research focuses on the production side of general equilibrium. In addition, we do not have a good understanding of the relationship between characteristics of goods in production and...

A network/search view of international trade in differentiated products is proposed. It is shown that this view can explain the importance of ethnic and extended family ties in trade, the success of diversified trading intermediaries such as Japan's sogo shosha, and the ubiquity of government...

This paper presents a model where human capital differences - rather than technology differences - can explain several central phenomena in the world economy. The results follow from the educational choices of workers, who decide not just how long to train, but also how broadly. A "knowledge...

A country's welfare depends on its ability to accumulate cognitive and noncognitive human capital. However, we do not fully understand what makes some countries successful at producing human capital and even struggle with measurement. e.g. international test scores are informative about the...

This paper presents a multi-district model that can be calibrated to data reflecting housing market conditions, public school finance mechanisms and private school markets. Simulations are undertaken to investigate the impact of private school vouchers. Households that differ in both their...