We study human capital accumulation in an environment of competitive search. Given that unemployed workers can default on their education loans, skilled individuals with a larger debt burden prefer riskier but better paid careers than is socially desirable. A higher level of employment risk in...

An analytically solvable model of new economic geography is developed. Acquisition of skills is costly for workers but it allows them to earn wages that are larger than those of the unskilled. Moreover, skills acquisition can be subsidized by a regional government. For large transport costs,...

We use important new training information from waves 8-10 of the British Household Panel Survey to document the various forms of work-related training received by men and women over the period 1998-2000, and to estimate their impact on wages. We initially present descriptive information about...

Over the last decade Ecuador has experienced a strong increase in financial transfers from migrated workers, amounting to 6.4 percent of GDP and 31.5 percent of total exports of goods and services in 2005. This paper investigates how remittances via trans-national networks affect human capital...

This paper analyzes how the implicit difference in time horizons between refugees and economic immigrants affects subsequent human capital investments and wage assimilation. The analysis uses the 1980/1990 Integrated Public Use Samples of the Census to study labor market outcomes of immigrants...

Researchers claim that children growing up away from their biological parents may be at a disadvantage and have lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment and uses household and child fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity...

The paper analyzes the effect of human-capital investments of heterogeneous individuals on the dynamics of the wage structure within a neoclassical growth model. The accumulation of physical capital changes relative factor prices and thus incentives to acquire skills, thereby altering the...

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect...

This paper quantifies the long-run impact of exposure to youth minimum wages and sheds light on its mechanisms. It uses remarkable longitudinal data spanning for twenty years and explores legislative changes that define groups of teenagers exposed for different durations. After controlling for...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father's temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labor supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is...