In this paper, we analyze the extent to which market forces create an incentive for cloning human beings. We show that a market for cloning arises if a large enough fraction of the clone?s income can be appropriated by its model. Only people with the highest ability are cloned, while people at...

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4% during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5% by 2000. Our analysis finds little...

How does the relationship between earnings and schooling change with the introduction of comprehensive economic reform? This paper sheds light on this question using a unique data set and procedure to reduce sample selection bias. Our evidence is from consistently coded, non-retrospective data...

This study seeks to distinguish among competing theories of urbanization in an explanation of recent, massive rural-to-urban migration in China. Specifically, the research evaluates whether Chinese urbanization following the 1990s liberalization of mobility and residential location restrictions...

This paper presents a novel stylized fact and analyzes its contribution to the skill bias of technical change in U.S. manufacturing. The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This finding points towards an...

The 45 region by 50 commodity by 5 primary factor version of the GTAP database provides us with the splits of total labor payments into two categories, viz. skilled and unskilled labor in each sector. The decomposition of total labor payments in all sectors and all regions according to...

How valuable are the education and skills acquired under socialism in a market economy? This paper uses data for about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998, to throw light on this question. We find that returns to schooling reach 10 percent early on and remain at this high level....

The growth of Austin's high-tech industry and the industry's multiple contributions to economic development led Forbes magazine to rank Austin as the number one and number two place to live in the United States in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Our data show that college and high-school graduates...

Education, child nutrition, adult health/nutrition, and labor mobility are critical factors in achieving recent sustained growth in factor productivity. To compare the contribution of these four human capital inputs, an expanded specification of the wage function is estimated from household...