Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate of return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate of return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

We identify a key role of factor supply, driven by demographic changes, in shaping several empirical regularities that are a focus of active research in macro and labor economics. In particular, the large movements of the return to experience over the last four decades are almost perfectly...

Liberalization of foreign trade and investment raises the domestic ratio of skilled to unskilled wages (skill premium) if the country has a sufficiently well-educated workforce, but lowers it otherwise. Wide wage inequality is undesirable on equity grounds, especially in poor countries where the...

We bring to bear a novel dataset covering the employment history of about 450 million individuals from 180 countries to study return migration and the impact of skilled international migration on human capital stocks across countries. Return migration is a common phenomenon, with 38% of skilled...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it assesses and measures the gaps in the stock of human capital across the world. It presents how effectively different regions are improving their stock of human capital, and how long it will take for developing countries to catch up with the current...

The research on educational inequality plays an essential role in characterizing the fairness and effectiveness of educational systems, and monitoring and evaluating processes of educational development. This paper introduces a new quinquennial data set of educational inequality of 146...