Head Start is a comprehensive, early childhood development program designed to augment the human capital and health capital levels of disadvantaged children. Grossman's (1972) health capital model suggests that early investments of this type should have lasting effects on health outcomes. This...

The paper analyzes the comparative effects of alternative health financing mechanisms on economic growth within a two-sector model with human capital. The transitional growth effects of a social insurance system are stronger than those of an out-of-pocket payment system. A private health...

Government spending on human capital continues to increase over the years. However, knowledge of the efficiency of such spending is limited. Using data from World Bank's World Development Indicator and World Governance Indicator from 2006 to 2017 and Data Envelopment Analysis and DEA...

This paper examines the differential effects of mother's schooling and father's schooling on the acquisition of schooling by their offspring. It does this in a "cross-cultural" context by comparing results across three countries: Germany, Hungary and the Former Soviet Union. It looks within...

We investigate wage differences between newly hired and incumbent employees. We show in a formal model that when employees care for wages as well as match-specific utility, incumbents earn less than new recruits if and only if firm-specific human capital is not too important. The existence and...

We study career and wage dynamics within and between firms using a large linked employer-employee panel dataset spanning 26 years. We construct six-level hierarchies for more than 5,000 firms. We replicate most of the analyses from Baker, Gibbs and Holmström (Quarterly Journal of Economics,...

This article studies path dependent regional structural change using a quantitative framework. Based on an inter-relatedness indicator, the degree to which local skill-bases exist and force local economies onto a path-dependent development trajectory is studied. The main question is into which...

Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child’s opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of...

In this paper, we abandon the stylized median voter and study (i) how distributional tensions can act in many different ways depending on social affinity and on the prospect of upward or downwardmobility of the different income classes, (ii) income distribution dynamics, intergenerational...

In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith (1776) considered the phenomenon of division of labor so enormously significant for the creation of a nation’s wealth that he devoted the first three chapters of his book to an investigation of this process. This is...