The 1993 Survey of Household Income and Wealth, a large cross-section of the Italian population covering 24,000 individuals, reports detailed information on children’s attendance of public and private schools and parents’ assessments of the quality of public schools in the city of residence....

Immigration is an important problem in many societies, and it has wide-ranging eects on the educational systems of host countries. There is a now a large empirical literature, but very little theoretical work on this topic. We introduce a model of family immigration in a framework where school...

Several of the Youth Allowance eligibility criteria for independent status were subject to severe criticism in the recent Review of Australian Higher Education (2008). Specifically, it seems to be the case that many students are able to qualify for socalled “independent-at-home” financial...

We study a model where student eort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. We can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside options will...

We model a South African city during Apartheid (in which both schooling and mobility are restricted on the basis of race) and after Apartheid (in which no restrictions are imposed). We first show that the inequality between blacks and whites decreases when Apartheid laws are removed. Indeed,...

There is a well-established high quality literature on the role of networks, particularly ethnic networks, in international trade. Ethnic networks are a way of overcoming informal barriers (information costs, risk and uncertainty) to trade by building trust and substituting for the difficulty of...

We construct a revised version of the Barro and Lee (1996) data set for a sample of OECD countries using previously unexploited sources and following a heuristic approach to obtain plausible time profiles for attainment levels by removing sharp breaks in the data that seem to reflect changes in...

In May 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centres across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of Ethiopian...

This article challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that greater longevity cannot explain the significant accumulation of human capital during the transition from stagnation to growth. This is because greater longevity raises children’s future income proportionally at all levels of...