This Paper studies the design of education policies in a setting of successive generations with heterogeneous individuals (high and low earning ability). Parents’ investment in education is motivated by warm-glow altruism and determines the probability that a child has high ability. Education...

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 labour forces of the two countries. The country with a relatively homogeneous population exports the good produced...

We provide an assessment of the French ZEP (Zones d’Education Prioritaire), a programme started in 1982 that channels additional resources to schools in disadvantaged areas and encourages the development of new teaching projects. Focusing on middle-schools, we first evaluate the impact of the...

Due to the presence of borrowing constraints in the market, the cost of educating the young members of a family is often borne by the adults. We consider intrafamily financing of human capital under the assumptions that individuals are selfish and binding contracts are not feasible. Cooperation...

This Paper studies the optimal education policy in the presence of different groups of households, with groups differing in the distribution of the ability to benefit from education. The main result is that the high ability individuals from groups with relatively few high ability individuals...

This paper investigates whether patent counts can be taken as indicators of macroeconomic innovation performance. The empirical model explicitly accounts for the two components of patenting output: research productivity and patent propensity. The empirical analysis aims at explaining the...

This paper investigates the importance of accessing public capital markets through an initial public offering (IPO), and the consequent relaxation of firms’ financial constraints, for firm-level long term employment decisions. We find that firms significantly increase post-IPO investment in...

This paper studies the impact of permanent and transitory shocks to income on parental investments in children. We use panel data on family income, and an index of investments in children in time and goods, from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Consistent with the...

I argue that distinguishing between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy beyond the crucial early childhood years affects the relationship between life expectancy and schooling in a meaningful way. In particular, I show that while the change in life expectancy at birth between 1960 and...

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with...