Human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities. However, the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive. The missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return, by...

Religiosity is defined as the importance of religion in all aspects of life. The definition is operationalized into a robust measure by aggregating 14 items from the World Values Surveys. Religiosity falls by 50 % when countries pass through the transition from being underdeveloped to becoming...

This article considers the transformation of the political system as countries pass through the Grand Transition from being a poor developing country to a wealthy developed country. In the process, most countries change from an authoritarian to a democratic political system, as measured by the...

We consider whether Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries are mainly poor because they are governed worse than other countries, as suggested by recent studies on the supremacy of institutions. Our empirical results show that the supremacy of institutions does not hold. SSA countries appear to face...

Nach dem sogenannten PISA-Schock wird insbesondere in Deutschland intensiv diskutiert, wie die Qualität der schulische Ausbildung verbessert werden kann. Dabei herrscht die Überzeugung vor, dass die Qualität der schulischen Ausbildung eine wichtige Determinante des langfristigen...

We try to identify which economic factors might be responsible for the large international differences in student performance. We present time series evidence for a number of European countries which suggests that rising educational expenditures obviously did not improve student performance....

Based on Baumol’s cost-disease model, we develop two alternativemeasures of the change in the productivity of schooling. Bothproductivity measures are based on changes in the relative price ofschooling. We find that in most OECD countries the price of schoolinghas increased faster in 1970-94...

We estimate changes in the productivity of schooling for six East Asian countries. Our productivity measure is based on changes in the relative price of schooling. A rising price of schooling relative to other labor-intensive service sectors should indicate declining relative schooling...