This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

Cultural diversity - in various forms - has in recent years turned into a prominent and relevant research and policy issue. There is an avalanche of studies across many disciplines that measure and analyse cultural diversity and its impacts. Based on different perspectives and features of the...

As is the case in most developed countries, the population of New Zealand is ageing numerically and structurally. Population ageing can have important effects on the distribution of personal income within and between urban areas. The age structure of the population may affect the distribution of...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

We compare a set of econometric studies that measure the effect of net internal migration in neoclassical models of long-run real income convergence and derive 67 comparable effect sizes. The precision-weighted estimate of beta convergence is about 2.7%. An increase in the net migration rate of...

Since the early 1990s many empirical studies have been conducted on the impact of international migration on international trade, predominantly from the host country perspective. Because most studies have adopted broadly the same specification, namely a log-linear gravity model of export and...

International migrants are widely recognised as agents of institutional change in their home countries. However, the huge growth in temporary migration in recent years demands a fresh investigation of this phenomenon. Theoretically, a country's diaspora constitutes one of the four principal...