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...

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...

This paper studies in the presence of flexible outsourcing the effects of outsourcing costs, productivity of outsourcing, wage tax and tax exemption in an imperfectly competitive labour markets when labour unions and firms negotiate wages and the impacts of labour tax progression on domestic...