When parents in Senegal decide upon primary school enrollment of their children, they might consider future returns to education. These future benefits in turn heavily depend on a child's prospects to attend secondary school. If private returns to primary schooling are very low and secondary...

Education is considered an important means of alleviating poverty and of improving an individual's job and earnings prospects. Nevertheless, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic school enrollment is far from complete and shows notable regional variation. This paper analyzes determinants of...

Several recent empirical studies have examined the gender effects of education on economic growth or on steady-state level of output using the much exploited, familiar cross-country data in order to determine their quantitative importance and the direction of correlation. This paper undertakes a...

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the...

Using the Cox proportional hazards model this paper empirically investigates how migration of household members and the receipt of remittances affect educational outcomes in Haiti. Based on a theoretical approach it tries to disentangle the effects of both phenomena that have mostly been jointly...

The Chinese growth miracle was based on exports and investment in recent years. While strong output growth has been maintained even during the financial crisis, the imbalances within the country increased. To return to a more sustainable path of development, policies are directed to improve the...

Kosovo's small economy substantially relies on money from abroad: an extraordinarily high number of migrants contribute to foreign capital inflow through remittances; remittances represented around 13% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009. This means that the well-being of many Kosovar...

El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala count among today's most violent countries of the world. Qualitative research has claimed that large-scale deportations of Central American convicts have played an important role for the spread of gangs and rampant violence in the region. Using a novel...

This paper empirically investigates whether emigrants from MENA countries self-select on cultural traits such as religiosity and gender-egalitarian attitudes. To do so, we use Gallup World Poll data on individual opinions and beliefs, migration aspirations, short-run migration plans, and...

Foreign language skills represent a form of human capital that can be rewarded in the labor market. Drawing on data from the Adult Education Survey of 2007, this is the first study estimating returns to foreign language skills in Turkey. We contribute to the literature on the economic value of...