Economic theory advances various arguments in favor of and against privatizing education. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these arguments influence voters opinions. We analyze two popular referenda in which some 400,000 voters in two Swiss cantons expressed their opinions on the...

We investigate how an artist’s death impacts on the price of her artwork by estimating individual death effects of a sample of famous visual artists who died between 1985 and 2010. Using data from art auctions that took place in a narrow window around the artists’ death, we apply various...

We examine the effect of pregnancy and parenthood on the research productivity of academic economists. Combining the survey responses of nearly 10,000 economists with their publication records as documented in their RePEc accounts, we do not find that motherhood is associated with low research...

I model the strategic interaction between scientists aiming for promotion and a research institution that seeks a highly productive faculty by setting a maternity allowance in the form of a minimum promotion standard. The model shows that maternity allowances need not derive from moral justice...

We study the effects of random assignment to coeducational and single-sex classes on the academic performance of female high school students. Our estimation results show that single-sex schooling improves the performance of female students in mathematics. This positive effect increases if the...

We exploit the 1997 school reform that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years to investigate the causal effect of education on emigration intentions. Our IV estimates indicate that an additional year of schooling increases the probability of reporting the intention to emigrate by 24...

Multinational enterprises are often accused to have a preference for investing in countries in which the working populations' civil and political rights are largely disregarded. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the popular political repression boosts FDI hypothesis and arrives...

We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our...

Most normative studies on child labor arrive at the conclusion that child labor is detrimental to social welfare. Child labor is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a politicaleconomic...