Friedman (1955) argued that giving parents freedom to choose schools would improve education. His argument was simple and compelling because it extended results from markets for consumer goods to education. We review the evidence, which yields surprisingly mixed results on Friedman's prediction....

Women's rights and economic development are highly correlated. Today, the discrepancy between the legal rights of women and men is much larger in developing compared to developed countries. Historically, even in countries that are now rich women had few rights before economic development took...

China's rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial...

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education than poorer ones. Both the anomalies of education history, and its...

This paper offers a thesis as to why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per-capita GDP, as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth where human capital is the quot;engine of growthquot;. The conjecture is that the ascendancy of...