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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

School closures during the 2020 pandemic forced countries to rapidly adopt distance learning, with uncertain effects on education inequalities. Using PISA 2018 data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, we find that students unable to learn remotely, because of a lack of ICT...

In this paper we study the allocation of time devoted to informal learning and education, i.e. those activities carried out during leisure time and outside formal education courses which boost individuals’ human and social capital. For immigrants the private investment in these activities is...

Peacetime military service has both positive and negative effects on human capital. While it depreciates academic abilities it also enhances non-cognitive skills. The net effect of conscription is hard to identify due to issues of self-selection, endogenous timing and omitted variables bias. We...