This paper bolsters Prescott's (2004) claim that high taxes are responsible for lacklustre labor market performance in continental European countries. We develop a lifecycle model with endogenous skill formation, endogenous labor supply, and endogenous retirement. Labor taxation distorts not...

This paper studies the impact of financial crises on society. Using data on 187 banking crises in 126 countries over the period 1970-2009, I examine the impact of a crisis not only on the economy and the financial sector, but also on health, education, poverty, and gender issues. A wider-angle...

Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...

Analysis of the dynamics of lending and household deposits allows to find interesting models of consumer behaviour from the perspective of consumption and savings balance. They fit into four provisional, sequentially alternating types of population's activity, which often depend on the number...

The “surprise value” of many economic observations makes our discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of drop-outs can often result in a smaller amount of education purchased. This result is very...

Ranking groups (schools, regions, counties) according to the average score of their constituent parts - say, ranking schools by the academic achievements of students - is a common yardstick in evaluation and a cornerstone of any planning process. In this paper we show that under certain...

The “surprise value” of many economic observations makes our discipline quite interesting for many students. One such anomaly is that providing “free” education in an effort to reduce the number of dropouts can often result in a lower level of educational quality purchased. This result...

If redistribution is distortionary, and if the income of skilled workers is due to knowledgeintensive activities and depends positively on intellectual property, a social planner which cares about income distribution may in principle want to use a reduction in Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)...

This paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime. The estimates of learning-investment rule from farm household panel data at the onset of the Green Revolution in India, show that (1) agents learn about schooling...

This paper shows a somehow counterintuitive result: an increase in the exam difficulty may reduce the average quality (productivity) of selected individuals. Since the exam does not verify all skills, when its standard rises, candidates with relatively low skills emphasized in the test and high...