For many students throughout the world the time to obtain an academic degree extends beyond the normal completion time while college tuition is typically constant during the years of enrollment. In particular, it does not increase when a student remains in a program beyond the normal completion...

During the postwar period, many countries have de-tracked their secondary schools, based on the view that early tracking was unfair. What are the efficiency costs, if any, of de- tracking schools? To answer this question, we develop a two skills - two jobs model with a frictional labour market,...

Our study analyses the costs and benefits of early child care for mothers’ labour supply and child development in Italy, exploring the role of the selection criteria used by local governments to assign child care slots. In Italy, only around 13% of the demand for public child care...

This paper studies two frequently observed portfolio behaviors that are seemingly inconsistent with rational portfolio choice. The first is the tendency of workers and entrepreneurs to hold their company's stock. The second is the propensity of workers to limit their equity holdings through...

We empirically investigate the local labor market determinants of female decisions of investing in post-secondary education, focusing on the role of career interruptions and barriers to job promotions. We use EU-Silc data on educational decisions of women who completed secondary schooling. We...

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workers may be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. We investigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data from Portugal. Using dynamic panel data...

This paper studies the link between migration, remittances and productive assets accumulation for a panel of poor rural households in Mexico over the period 1997-2006. In a context of financial markets imperfections, migration may act as a substitute for imperfect credit and insurance provision...

This research examines the economic origins of ethnolinguistic diversity. The empirical analysis constructs detailed data on the distribution of land quality and elevation across contiguous regions, virtual and real countries, and shows that variation in elevation and land quality has...

We generalize the standard search, matching, and bargaining framework to allow individuals to acquire productivity-enhancing schooling prior to labor market entry. As is wellknown, search frictions and weakness in bargaining position contribute to under-investment from an efficiency perspective....