In response to declining budgets, many school districts in the US have reduced funding for sports. In Europe, parents may respond to difficult economic times by spending less on sports clubs for their children. Such cuts are unwise if participating in sports is an investment good as well as a...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

The paper considers a two-country model of overlapping generations economies with intergenerational transfers carried out in the form of bequest and investment in human capital. We examine in competitive equilibrium the optimal provision of education with and without capital markets integration....

A strictly risk-averse individual with an exogenous gross income in period one can acquire human capital in the same period and evade taxes. Period-two income rises with educational investments in period one and can also be hidden from tax authorities. It is shown that a greater tax...

This article analyzes the consequences of integration in public education. I show that the flight from the integrated multicultural public schools to private education increases private educational expenditures and, as a result, decreases fertility among more affluent parents whose children...

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...

In this paper we reexamine the Feldstein-Horioka finding of limited international capital mobility by using a broader view (i.e., including human capital) of investment and saving. We find that the Feldstein-Horioka result is impervious to this change.

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

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 bolsters Prescott’s (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...