In 1910, 12 percent of American 14-17 year olds were enrolled in high school; by 1930, enrollment had increased to 50 percent; enrollment in Britain was 12 percent in 1950. This paper argues that by increasing the skill premium, the massive inflows of European unskilled immigrants at the turn of...

We introduce a new suite of macroeconomic models that extend and complement the Debt, Investment, and Growth (DIG) model widely used at the IMF since 2012. The new DIG-Labor models feature segmented labor markets, efficiency wages and open unemployment, and an informal non-agricultural sector....

This paper addresses the potential effects on human capital accumulation and economic growth of the alternative compositions of public expenditures in the context of a computable dynamic general equilibrium model of overlapping generations and heterogeneous agents in which altruistic parents...

We examine the issue of technical assistance versus brain drain repatriation as alternative strategies for transferring scarce skills to a skill-poor economy. Technical assistance relies mainly on expatriate skills and labor from the host country, while brain drain repatriation seeks to effect a...

Epidemics have disrupted lives for centuries with deleterious human capital and economic repercussions. In this paper, we investigate how epidemics episodes have impacted school dropouts in developing countries, considering 623 epidemics episodes across countries from 1970 to 2019. Our estimates...

Standard theoretical arguments tell us that countries with relatively little capital benefit from financial integration as foreign capital flows in and speeds up the process of income convergence. We show in a calibrated neoclassical model that conventionally measured welfare gains from this...

We develop a simple macroeconomic model that assesses the effects of higher foreign aid on output growth and other macroeconomic variables, including the real exchange rate. The model is easily tractable and requires estimation of only a few basic parameters. It takes into account the impact of...

The present paper takes a fresh theoretical and empirical look into the relationship between Wagner’s law and economic development. It introduces human capital into a classic two-sector model of unbalanced growth. It shows that, as an economy develops, changes in the relative returns to human...

This paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model calibrated to Ugandan data to examine the welfare effects of alternative scenarios of government expenditure and tax financing. Two expenditure types are considered: social spending that affects human capital, and infrastructure expenditures...