Despite the rapid expansion and increasing importance of private education in developing countries, very little is known about the impact of studying in private schools on educational attainment and wages. This paper contributes to fiÂ…lling this gap by estimating the returns to private high...

Conventional in-work benefits or tax credits are now well established as a policy instrument for increasing labour supply and tackling poverty. A different sort of in-work credit is one where the payments are time-limited, conditional on previous receipt of welfare, and, perhaps, not...

The Swedish comprehensive school reform implied an extension of the number of years of compulsory school from 7 or 8 to 9 for the entire nation and was implemented as a social experiment by municipality between 1949 and 1962. A previous study (Meghir and Palme, 2005) has shown that this reform...

This paper examines changes in health and disability related transfers in the UK over the last thirty years, and describes how they are related to changes in labour force participation. The objective is to present a comprehensive description of the reforms to the institutional setting, along...

Understanding how policy can affect university participation is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation. In this paper, we estimate the separate impacts of tuition fees and maintenance grants on the decision to enter university in the UK. We use Labour...

I develop and estimate a model of the labor market in which precautionary savings interacts with labour market frictions to produce substantial inequality in wealth among ex ante identical workers. I show that a model of on-the-job search,in which workers are risk averse and markets are...

<p><p>In 2010 China was the world's fourth largest filer of patent applications. This followed a decade of unprecedented increases in investment in skills and Research and Development. If current trends continue China could rank first in the very near future. We provide evidence that the growth in...</p></p>

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

<p>This study evaluates an intervention in the dairy subsector by an Indian livelihood promotion institution and conducts a detailed analysis of the main cost and benefit factors of the activity. Two rounds of data are available which allows for the comparison of impacts and costs and benets under...</p>

Issues of inequality, distribution and redistribution are commanding progressively more attention in the minds of not only world leaders, politicians, and academics but also of ordinary people. So, what constitutes distributive justice in the minds of ordinary people? The philosophical...