We propose a new microeconomic explanation for the divergent experiences of economies in forming human capital. We suggest that the positive effect of a longer life expectancy on human capital formation arises from two separate effects: a life expectancy effect and a prolonged intergenerational...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has grown far more rapidly than trade during the last two decades. As with the other prominent features of globalisation, FDI is controversial. The impact of FDI on labour markets has been of growing concern, particularly, for source countries. The deterioration...

A conventional argument in the child-labor debate is that improvements in access to schools are an effective way to reduce the labor force participation of children. It is argued that schooling competes with economic activity in the use of children's time, and enhanced access to schools,...

Children have always been part of the economic life of societies. Historical evidence indicates that the contribution of children to family income in cash or in kind has been consistently significant. Currently, the issue of child labor has become an important global development issue in...

Failure to accumulate human capital is one of the pressing problems of developing countries. Lacking human capital formation bears consequences on an economy wide level, since education contributes to labor productivity. We examine the impact of increased school enrollment with regard to...

The extremely large disparities in employment rates across Italian regions, and the bad performance of the Italian economy in terms of job creation in the 80´s and early 90´s make job creation a top-priority in the economic policy agenda. This paper uses data on employment from 784 Local Labor...

This paper empirically assesses the impact of specialisation on the synchronisation of regional business cycles in two core countries of EMU, namely France and Germany. Several specialisation indices are introduced and some first stylised facts about interregional business cycle correlations are...

We analyze determinants of regional industry mix and focus especially on the influence of labor market characteristics. By combining a labor market pooling argument with an argument involving the cost of switching a worker from one firm to another, we show that in the presence of product market...

This study discriminates FDI technology spillover from learning effects. Whenever learning takes time, our model predicts that foreign investors deduct the economic value of learning from wages of inexperienced workers and add it to experienced ones to prevent them from moving to local...

A firm monopsonistically hires labor from a pool containing both skilled and unskilled workers. The marginal value of a worker depends on the match between the job and the worker's skill level. Unskilled workers can have negative productivity if they are placed in a skilled job. The firm cannot...