Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, efficient education policy is characterized for a Ramsey-like scenario in which the government is constrained to use linear instruments. It is shown that education should be effectively subsidized if, and only...

We develop a model of schooling and skill acquisition, highlighting informational asymmetries that distort the incentives to educate. A key feature of our model is that education acts simultaneously as a signaling device and as a method for workers to enhance their productivity. We show that...

The paper studies the effect that skilled labour mobility has on efficient education policy. The model is one of two periods in which a representative taxpayer decides on labour, education, and saving. The government can only use linear tax and subsidy instruments. It is shown that the mobility...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to highlight the role of human capital accumulation of agents differentiated by skill type in the joint determination of social mobility and the skill premium. We first show that our model captures the empirical co-movement of the skill...

The stylized facts suggest a negative relationship between tax progressivity and the skill premium from the early 1960s until the early 1990s, and a positive one thereafter. They also generally imply rising tax progressivity, except for the 1980s. In this paper, we ask whether optimal tax policy...

Using an originally constructed dataset that follows 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to the labor market, we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We exploit the...

There is no clear theoretical prediction regarding whether home computers are an important input in the educational production function. To investigate the hypothesis that access to a home computer affects educational outcomes, we conduct the first-ever field experiment involving the provision...