Migration has a strong economic impact on the sending and host countries. Since individuals and groups do not benefit equally from migration, interest groups emerge to protect and take care of their narrow self-interests and compete for rents generated by migration. Narrow self-interests may be...

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...

"The conventional wisdom that inflation and unemployment are unrelated in the long-run implies that these phenomena can be analysed by separate branches of economics. The macro literature tries to explain inflation dynamics and estimates the NAIRU. The labour macro literature tries to explain...

We bring the notion of connectedness (Diebold and Yilmaz, 2012) to a set of two critical macroeconomic variables as inflation and unemployment. We focus on the G7 economies plus Spain, and use monthly data –high-frequency data in a macro setting – to explore the extent and consequences of...

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 examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...