Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

I extend Spence's (1973) signaling model by assuming some workers are overconfident - they underestimate their marginal cost of acquiring education - and some are underconfident. Firms cannot observe workers' productive abilities and beliefs but know the fractions of high-ability, overconfident,...

I extend Spence's (1974) labor market signaling model by assuming some workers are overconfident and some underconfident. Overconfident (underconfident) workers underestimate (overestimate) their marginal cost of acquiring education. Firms cannot observe workers' productive abilities and cannot...

This paper surveys the trends in gender gaps in education, their causes and potential policy implications. I show that female educational attainment has surpassed, or is about to surpass, male educational attainment in most industrialized countries. These gaps reflect male overrepresentation...

Immigration is an important problem in many societies, and it has wide-ranging effects on the educational systems of host countries. There is a now a large empirical literature, but very little theoretical work on this topic. We introduce a model of family immigration in a framework where school...

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the effects of poverty and educational policies on school attendance, child labour and growth. We consider an OLG model, with parental educational choices. It is assumed there is a trade off between child labour and human capital accumulation. If...

Recent studies conclude that human capital should be a high priority because it is a key growth input, particularly in an increasingly knowledge based economy and an important lever of social cohesion policy. However, existing studies focusing on cross-country growth performance have produced...

This paper investigates the effect of parents’ current income and long-term family characteristics on individuals’ highest educational qualification obtained by age 26 using UK data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. The issues of the possible sample selection bias produced by the not...

Abstract We re-examine the theoretical concept of a production function for cognitive achievement, and argue that an indirect production function that depends upon the variables that constrain parents' choices is both more tractable from an econometric point of view, and more interesting from an...