We show that wage-tax financed subsidies encourage investment in riskyeducation and offer welfare gains. Tax competition and labour mobilitymay lead to substantial erosion of regional taxation. On the other hand,mobility insures against region-specific shocks encouraging investmentin education....

Using panel data for 78 countries of origin we examine the impact of the inflow of foreign students in to the United States on migration patterns in the country over the 1971-2001 period. We find that the stock of foreign students is an important predictor of subsequent migration. The estimated...

Using data from 1960 to 2000 for OECD countries, we analyze the effect of compulsory military service on the demand for higher education, measured by the fraction of the working-age population enrolled in tertiary education. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that a military draft has...

We study the role of beauty in politics using candidate photos that figured prominently in electoral campaigns. Our investigation is based on visual assessments of 1929 Finnish political candidates from 10,011 respondents (of which 3708 were Finnish). As Finland has a proportional electoral...

This paper analyzes simultaneous voting on the wage tax rate and investment in public education with three overlapping generations and ability differences inside each cohort. Wage tax revenue finances public education and social security benefits. The presence of ability differences introduces a...

A growing theoretical literature on the effect of politicians’ salaries on the average level of skills of political candidates yields ambiguous predictions. In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on the level of education of parliamentary candidates. We take advantage of...

This paper analyzes educational choices and political support for subsidies to higher education in the presence of a time consistency problem in income redistribution. There may be political support for so generous subsidization that it motivates the median voter to obtain higher education....

Economic theory predicts that military conscription is associated with static inefficiencies as well as with dynamic distortions of the accumulation of human and physical capital. Relative to an economy with an all-volunteer force, output levels and growth rates should be lower in countries that...

This paper proposes and analyzes a model of how the behavior of voters and that of potential party activists together determine party membership and the ideological characteristics of party platforms. Membership decisions are based on expressive motivations, whereas platforms are chosen...

We propose a dynamic general-equilibrium model with human capital accumulation to evaluate the economic consequences of compulsory services (such as military draft or social work). Our analysis identifies a so far ignored dynamic cost arising from distortions in time allocation over the life...