From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring any Jewish father to educate his children. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this exogenous change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history....

Social Security programmes around the world link public pensions to retirement: people do not lose their pensions if they make a million dollars a year in the stock market, but they do confront marginal tax rates of up to 100% if they choose to work. After arguing that most existing theories...

Traditionally, economists have been concerned over factors that improve economic growth, initially introducing physical capital and later human capital. We will consider a new factor, social capital. Also, we will introduce in this paper the effect of the fiscal policy on economic growth. In...

For analyzing the impact of climate change and of international climate policies on the international division of labor and on regional welfare the use of a disaggregated multi–sectoral, multi–regional dynamic computable general equilibrium model is appropriate. This paper discusses the...

The paper concentrates on the question whether the low level of productivity in East Germany can be explained by deficits in the stock of human capital. It is shown that figures on “formal” qualifications yield a too optimistic view on human capital endowments; in fact, the effective stock...

There is a startling gap between, allegedly, globalization-induced changes in international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) and recent empirical evidence on the relative importance of determinants of FDI in developing countries. We show that surprisingly little has changed since...

Immigrants assimilate in various dimensions at different rates. Moreover, in each of these dimensions they assimilate at rates that may differ from those of their children. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the pace of assimilation of immigrants in various dimensions affects the rate...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others’ trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product...

We examine how globalization affects firms incentives to train workers. In our model, firms invest in productivity-enhancing worker training before Cournot competition takes place. When two separated product markets become integrated and are thus replaced with a market with greater demand and...