The need for graduates who would be productive citizens able to contribute significantly to the Nigerian economy led to the overhaul of the old education system 6-5-4 and the implementation of the 6-3-3-4 system, with its first set of graduates from secondary schools in 1988. The main objective...

The last decade has seen a resurgence of parastatal crop marketing institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, many of which cite improving food security and incomes as key goals. However, there is limited empirical evidence on the welfare effects of these programs. This article considers one such...

The influx of immigrants has shifted the ethnic composition of public schools in many states including North Carolina. Recent evidence from North Carolina suggests that increases in Limited English students' concentration have led to a slight decline in performance solely for students at the top...

There is a growing trend of buying homes among the single population in the U.S. This trend has been referred to as "Going Solo" and is particularly evident among women who are the focus of our study. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that homeownership probabilities can be affected by...

Differences in geopolitical regions of Nigeria are not debatable. However, there is no clear consensus on the dimension of these disparities. In this paper, claims of geopolitical region disparities in labor market outcomes are investigated using survey data from Nigeria between 1996-1999. Both...

There is data evidence that welfare has improved post democracy in Nigeria. However, the distribution or concentration of the benefits in subgroups of the population is unknown. In this paper, the question of differential welfare impacts, across and within gender, post democracy in Nigeria is...

In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study,...

Until very recently, the conventional wisdom was that the return to education was very high in Africa. However, some recent analysis point to low average returns to education in some African countries including Nigeria. Given these low returns to education, a relevant question is what causes low...

There is anecdotal evidence that the standard of living for the educated has fallen in Venezuela over the last few years. This evidence comes as a surprise because after experiencing an economic downturn in 2002 and 2003, Venezuela's economy has boomed (gross domestic product growth has hovered...

It has been well documented in the literature that ethnicity matters significantly in the determination of self-employment rates. In particular, African-American self-employment rates lag far behind rates for other racial groups. Similarly, the literature also provides evidence of the long lived...