Empirical analyses for the US suggest that stronger people's control over the school budget is deleterious to student performance. Using Swiss data on ninth graders in mathematics, reading and natural science collected jointly with the PISA study 2000, this paper tests this hypothesis for...

Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This...

Using Targeted Fact Environments ("TFEs") in First Year Lawyering Skills ("FYLS") classes, particularly in service to an area non-profit, and at essentially no additional cost, would create a more relevant first-year experience, inform and energize an entire captive cohort on issues of import to...

With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

The recent literature on externalities of schooling in the U.S. is rather mixed: positive external effects of average education are hardly found at all, while often positive externalities from the share of college graduates are identified. This paper proposes a simple model to explain this fact...

Higher oil-price shocks benefit unskilled workers relative to skilled workers: At the businesscycle frequency, energy prices and the skill premia display a strong, negative correlation. We assess the robustness of this negative correlation using several methods and data sources, including...