This paper characterizes an intergenerational welfare state with endogenous education and pension choice under general equilibrium-probabilistic voting. We show that politically implementing public education program always increases the future human capital, but this higher future human capital...

Since 1990, Taiwan increased the college share of its labor force from 7% to 28% by converting junior colleges to 4-year colleges.  Such a rapid surge in skill supply should suppress college wages and lower income inequality.  Instead, inequality rose steadily.  The surge of weaker college...

We test whether commonly used measures of agglomeration economies encourage new firm entry in both urban and rural markets.  Using new firm location decisions in Iowa and North Carolina, we find that measured agglomeration economies increase the probability of new firm entry in both urban and...

Using only ordinal axioms, we characterize several multi-group school segregation indices: the Atkinson Indices for the class of school districts with a given fixed number of ethnic groups and the Mutual Information Index for the class of all districts. Properties of other school segregation...

The paper draws upon the work of T.W. Schultz to show that human capital theory and labor market adjustments have important implications for investing in people for the 21st Century.

School autonomy and parental participation have been frequently proposed as ways of making schools more productive. Less clear is how governments can foster decentralized decision-making by local schools. This paper shows that across eight Latin-American countries, most of the variation in local...

We propose a set of axioms for the measurement of school-based segregation with any number of ethnic groups. These axioms are motivated by two criteria. The first is evenness: how much do ethnic groups’ distributions across schools differ? The second is representativeness: how different are...

This paper gives an axiomatic characterization of the multigroup Atkinson indices of segregation relying entirely on ordinal axioms. We show that the Symmetric Atkinson index represents the unique ordering that treats ethnic groups symmetrically, that is invariant to population growth rates that...