Do new school types focusing on practical and business-related knowledge lead to increased economic performance? To analyze this question, this paper examines the introduction of two types of modern secondary education, the Gewerbeschule and its successor, the Realschule, in nineteenth-century...

Economic growth and unemployment exhibit an ambiguous relationship – according to empirical studies. This ambiguity can be investigated by observing the role of the underground economy in shaping the productivity of firms. Indeed, unemployment may be absorbed by underground firms, which adopt...

This paper analyzes the human capital training strategies adopted between the 1850s and 1930s by railroad companies in Mexico and Chile. These two countries enable one to contrast the different routes taken by the same type of firm, technology and labor force. A propos of this, we suggest that...

We develop a urban economic model in which agents locate in cities of different size so as to maximize the net output of the whole system of cities in a country. From this model two new city size distributions are exactly derived. We call these functions “threshold double Pareto Generalized...

We show that socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of many facets of a child's personality. The facets of personality we investigate encompass time preferences, risk preferences, and altruism, as well as crystallized and fluid IQ. We measure a family's SES by the mother's and...

"Social Capital of Old People on the Example of Bialystok Residents" is a book based on theoretical and empirical study, which presents an issue of diagnosing and using of old people social capital in the local and regional development processes. This issue is significant because of the threats...

I maintain that fatalistic tendencies are the output of the interaction between cultural factors (and in particular of religious beliefs) and historical Institutional experience. Using WVS data this idea has been tested against two well known sociological theories on the origin of fatalism:...

Age, education, income discrepancy, and unemployment level are the main factors that define the portrait of the Kyr-gyz labor migrant. Remittances shape the present state of the Kyrgyz economy;the quality of human capital, and its future. Efficiently functioning social networks abroad play a...

Annotated remarks made at the 50th Anniversary Conference “Fortalecimiento institucional de los bancos centrales y efectividad de la política monetaria”, of the Central Bank of Nicaragua, February 2010. The paper lays out the importance of institutional strenthening (governance) as an...

Central banks can play an important role in facilitating and promoting regional economic and monetary integration. Examples are the European monetary union and a more recent initiative by a group of Asian central banks to boost liquidity in local bond markets in Asia through the “Asian Bond...