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...

Most labor scarce overseas countries moved decisively to restrict their immigration during the first third of the 20th century. This autarchic retreat from unrestricted and even publiclysubsidized immigration in the first global century before World War I to the quotas and bans introduced...

Economists have concerns about the firing cost implications of mandated severance plans. Analysis reveals that predicted severance plan consequences depend critically on the precise structure of the plan. Whether governments mandate (i) severance insurance plans or (ii) severance savings plans...

We investigate whether a causal interpretation of the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth is appropriate and whether cross-country evidence supports a case for the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of ethnic network on U.S. exports. In line with recent research, our dataset is a panel of exports from U.S. states to 29 foreign countries. Our analysis departs from the literature in two ways, both of which show that previous estimates of the...

This paper uses as source material twenty-three autobiographical essays by Nobel economists presented since 1984 at Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) and published in Lives of the Laureates (MIT Press). A goal of the lecture series is to enhance understanding of the link between biography...