We examine the effects of differences in social capital on first and second best transfers to families with children, in an asymmetric information context where the number of births, and the future earning capacity of each child that is born, are random variables. The probability that a couple...

Should a redistributive government optimally subsidize education to provoke a reduction in the skill premium through general equilibrium effects on wages? To answer this question, this paper studies optimal linear and non-linear redistributive income taxes and education subsidies in two-type...

Demographic trends in most developed economies are characterized by rising longevity and decreasing birthrates. These trends endanger the sustainability of the current public pension systems. Therefore social security reform proposals are on the agenda in many countries. This paper demonstrates...

This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to analyze the implications of different financing regimes in the education sector for human capital formation and economic welfare. Agents privately invest in education after they have received a noisy information signal about their...

I show how the influences of unskilled immigration, differential fertility between immigrants and the local indigenous population, and incentives for investment in human capital combine to predict the decline of the West. In particular, indigenous low-skilled workers lose from unskilled...

In this note, we present a novel channel for a brain gain. Students from a developing country study in a developed host country. A higher permanent migration probability of these students appears to be a brain drain for the developing country in the first place. However, it induces the host...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

This paper explores how the specification of the earnings function impacts the optimal tax treatment of human capital. If education is complementary to labor effort, education should be subsidized to offset tax distortions on labor supply. However, if most of the education is enjoyed by high...

This work focuses on a temporary guest-worker-type migration of individuals from the middle class of the wealth distribution. The article demonstrates that the possibility of a lowskilled guest-worker employment in a higher wage foreign country lowers the relative attractiveness of the skilled...

In this note, we show that labour market integration can be a double-edged sword. In the presence of local human capital externalities, integration and the ensuing agglomeration of skilled labour can cause a decline in human capital and the total wage sum (net of education costs). In particular,...