This article analyzes the impact of HIV/AIDS on the global convergence in life expectancy as well as infant and child survival rates by comparing two scenarios. One is based on actual estimated and extrapolated values given the existence of the epidemic (‘AIDS- scenario’). The other is based...

This paper analyses the effect of school quality on early career earnings. Using confidential district level information from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), it is demonstrated that class size has no discernible effect on early career earnings. This finding is robust to changes in...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

A number of recent studies have illustrated the link between health and growth (Gallup and Sachs 2000, McCarthy et al. 2000, Bhargava et al. 2000). This paper argues that a key mechanism through which health affects growth is via total factor productivity (TFP). We first estimate TFP based on a...