We examine the effect of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), one of the largest workfare programs in the world, on human capital investment. Since NREGS increases labor demand, it could increase the opportunity cost of schooling, lowering human capital investment even as...

Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production, particularly in the developing world. We introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age. Using data on test scores and schooling from rural India, we show that...

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on capital and labor incomes in a life-cyclemodel of human capital investment, financial savings, and labor supply with heteroge-nous individuals. A dual income tax with a positive marginal tax rate on not onlylabor income but also capital income is...

This paper offers a thesis for why the US overtook the UK and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital we mean an intangible asset, best...

Using a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005-14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam, we test for the impact of violent conflict on female students' enrollment rates. We find that a doubling of average killings in a district-year leads to a 13 per cent drop in girls' enrollment rate with...

This paper offers a thesis for why the United States (US) overtook the United Kingdom (UK) and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital...

We explore the effects of persistent income shocks on human capital using oil price fluctuations in a large sample of relevant African countries and employing micro data from multiple waves of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). Theoretically, such shocks enable human capital investment via...

To understand the weak empirical relationship between human capital and macroeconomic performance, this paper presents a model in which human capital is allocated to three activities: production, tax collection (bureaucracy), and public education. The effective tax rate is low in poor countries...

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers' careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learningby- Doing (LBD) and...