We examine the phenomenon of forsaken schooling resulting from opportunities abroad. The brain-drain/gain literature takes as its starting point the migration of educated/professional labor from poor origin countries to richer host countries. While high-skilled emigration is troubling, even more...

This study reexamines the relationship between economic growth and inequality, challenging the conventional view that regards inequality solely as an impediment to development. While recognizing the essential role of economic growth in development plans, our analysis extends beyond this...

Ample empirical evidence has found that access to childcare for preschool children increases mothers' labor force participation and employment. In this paper, we investigate whether increased childcare for primary school children improves the quality of jobs mothers find by estimating the causal...

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...

This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

This essay provides a comprehensive interpretative framework to understand the reasons why the school-to-work transition (SWT) is so slow and hard in Italy. The country is a typical example of the South European SWT regime, where the educational system is typically rigid and sequential, the...

This survey organizes and discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of university student achievements. According to the theoretical framework, the decision to invest in tertiary education is a sequential process made under gradually decreasing levels of uncertainty...

Brain drain BD, human capital h, and inequality's institutional impact is examined in a model where a rent-seeking elite taxes residents and voicing affects the likelihood of regime change. We find that BD and h's impact on institutional quality (Q) are as follows: i) Q is a U-shaped function of...

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 paper is a review of the literature in economics up to the early 1980s on the issue of estimating the earnings return to schooling and labor market experience. It begins with a presentation of Adam Smith's (1776) analysis of wage determination, with the second of his five points on...