This paper presents a theory on the endogenous choice of a country's education policy and the two-way causal relationship between trade and education systems. The setting of a country's education system determines its talent distribution and comparative advantage in trade; the possibility of trade...

Parental involvement in matchmaking may distort the choice of spouse because parents are willing to substitute love for market and household production, which are more sharable between parents and their children. This paper finds supportive evidence in a survey of Chinese couples. In both rural...

This paper explores a new perspective in understanding social trust and its formation in a game theoretic setting. Evidence from experiments and real life suggests individuals differ in predisposition to cooperate, which is essentially a component of human capital that is costly to cultivate but...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

In a principalagent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

Much evidence suggests individuals differ in their predisposition to cooperate, which is essentially a component of human capital. This paper examines the role of individual cooperative tendencies and their interactions with institutions in generating social trust; it also endogenizes...

This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of dierent production factors and the political con.icts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main production factor in economy evolves from...