This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

Our societies are witnessing a steady increase in longevity. This demographic evolution is accompanied by some convergence across countries, whereas substantial longevity inequalities persist within nations. The goal of this article is to survey some crucial implications of changing longevity on...

This paper argues that skill formation is a life-cycle process and develops the implications of this insight for Scottish social policy. Families are major producers of skills, and a successful policy needs to promote effective families and to supplement failing ones. We present evidence that...

In a two-sector-economy with real wage rigidity, we examine how technical progress in one sector affects aggregate unemployment. We show that aggregate unemployment decreases for uneven technical change in the case of Cobb-Douglas production functions. For every type of technical progress there...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...

We examine wage bargaining when employers and labor unions do not always take all general equilibrium effects into account but learn a steady state. If agents do hardly consider general equilibrium effects, low real wages and low unemployment results. With an intermediate view, when partial...