We explore the relationship between government size and economic growth in an endogenous growth model with human capital and an unproductive capital which facilitates rent-seeking. With exogenous as well as endogenous time discounting, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the size of...

The Italian economy performs well below the EU average. The reason is a dramatic and persistent low rate of investment, always invoked but never supported by national and supra-national institutions. However, investment to increase the quantity and quality of human capital is key to boost...

We consider how the possibility of international migration affects an individual’s educational choices in their home country. Without the opportunity to emigrate abroad people choose their educational investment (and hence their skill level) as we might expect, taking into account the utility...

Fertility rates have declined dramatically across almost all highincome countries over the past decades. This has raised concerns about future economic prospects. Indeed, fully- and semi-endogenous growth models imply that a shrinking workforce would lead to declining income growth and perhaps...

The financial crisis led to a deep recession in many industrial countries. While large emerging countries recovered relatively quickly from the financial crisis, their performance deteriorated in the recent years, despite the modest recovery in advanced economies. The higher divergence of...

This paper mainly examines the effect of financial development on the recession, while controlling for potential recession factors. Using panel data of 129 countries spanning 1990-2010, we implemented "Locally Weighted Scatterplot Smoothing", "Local Linear" and "Iteratively Reweighted Least...

In this paper we investigate whether human capital accumulation, during adolescence, depends on home investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) equipment. Using micro-level data, for children aged 17-18 years old, drawn from the Greek part of the European Union Statistics on...

Despite extensive literature on peer effects, the role of peers on personality skill development remains poorly understood. We fill this gap by investigating the effects of having disadvantaged primary school peers, generated by random classroom assignment and parental migration for employment....

This study examines the impact that over-education has on the earnings of private and public sector workers in Trinidad and Tobago. Using individual person's data from the Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) for the period 1991-2015, the returns of over-educated workers is...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...