This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a 'decentralized' scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a 'hierarchical' scheme,...

This paper investigates the effects of India’s rural roads program (PMGSY) on morbidity, using data on 279 households drawn from 30 villages in a region of upland Orissa. The households were surveyed in 2010 and 2013, yielding an unbalanced panel of 1580 individuals, 1076 of whom were present...

COVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of the world's oldest, with those in Kenya,...

In the presence of agglomeration economies, the effects of a rural roads programme depend not only on the reduction in transportation costs, but also on the form of labour mobility. When financed by a poll tax on rural households, the wage will rise, accompanied by some return migration,...

The effects of a rural roads programme depend on labour mobility, how the programme is financed, and agglomeration economies. If financed by a rural poll tax and cross‐price effects and agglomeration economies are sufficiently small, the wage will rise, with some return migration. Taxes on...

Do 'local' methods of evaluation, such as partial equilibrium analysis at market prices or estimation of shadow prices, provide reliable assessments of a large rural roads programme's social profitability? Consider a small open economy with one city and a rural hinterland, two traded goods, two...

The structure employed is a small open economy, with one city and a rural hinterland, two traded goods, a transport sector, two specific factors, and mobile labour. A socially profitable programme will promote not only internal, but also external trade. Theory and numerical examples indicate...

This paper studies the formation of human capital and its transmission across generations when premature adult mortality is a salient feature of the demographic landscape, either permanently or in the form of a long-period wave that follows the outbreak of an epidemic. We establish several...

This paper analyses the effects of disease and war on the accumulation of human and physical capital. We employ an overlapping-generations frame-work in which young adults, confronted with such hazards and motivated by old-age provision and altruism, make decisions about investments in schooling...