Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...

Growth has been high and widespread in the last decade in Africa. Whether this shift in Africa's fortune has impacted poverty has been a subject of controversy. This paper brings into focus recent evidence on the pace of poverty reduction in Africa and addresses whether or not previously held...

We analyze the optimal life-cycle education decision of a single atomistic individual and show that the standard result of part-time education and part-time work throughout the life-cycle holds only under very special and unrealistic assumptions. Once these assumptions are relaxed, different...

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for the importance of human development related investments based on i) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty...

The literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on Ravallion (2012) who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety Less Developed Countries (LDCs) during 1977-2007. This paper revisits cross-country poverty convergence using data from the...

Empirical evidence in the sparse literature on poverty convergence currently relies on cross-sectional analysis, where Less Developed Countries (LDCs) starting out poorer are found to have enjoyed no faster subsequent poverty reduction during the past three decades than those starting out...

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of non-communicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone...

Economists increasingly accept that social norms have powerful effects on human behavior and outcomes. In recent history, one norm widely adhered to in most developed nations has been for men to be the primary breadwinner within mixed-gender households. As women have entered the labor market in...

Micro-based and macro-based approaches have been used to assess the effects of health on economic growth. Micro-based approaches aggregate the return on individual health from Mincerian wage regressions to derive the macroeconomic effects of population health. Macro-based approaches estimate a...