Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school - socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This essay...

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites and to investigate the nature of the links between recruitment of elites and economic growth. The main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their...

This paper offers an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of uniform public schooling, which is viewed here as a way for the government to precommit itself to restraints on future income redistribution. Such precommitment is likely to enhance accumulation of human capital, to bolster...

Recent work shows that peers affect student achievement, but the mechanisms are not well understood. I show that peer behavior is an important mechanism, perhaps more so than ability, by exploiting exogenous timing in diagnosis/treatment of ADD among peers that improves peer behavior while...

Education can serve skill formation and socialisation goals both of which are conducive to desirable economic outcomes. However, the political manipulation of the school curricula can give rise to indoctrination effects with counterproductive welfare consequences on its pupils. This paper...

In this paper, we study how the birth of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of the Italian free cities-states (the commune) in the period 1000-1300 a.d. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that after the foundation of a new university the distance between each...

Excessive preoccupation for self-image has been pointed out as an essential factor explaining food disorders. This paper draws upon Akerlof and Kranton (2000) to model how "self-image" and others' appearances influence health related behaviours. We estimate the influence of "peers' image" on the...