An increase in the probability of work abroad, where the returns to schooling are higher than at home, induces more individuals in a developing country to acquire education, which leads to an increase in the supply of educated workers in the domestic labor market. Where there is a sticky...

This book presents an accessible and sometimes controversial economic exploration of numerous issues surrounding sex, marriage and family. It analyzes the role of ‘vanity’, defined as social status and self-esteem, in social and economic behaviors.

Many children worldwide are left-behind by parents migrating for work — over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left-behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs (e.g., study time, enrollment, schooling...

This paper provides a model of involuntary unemployment by combining the insights of the sticky wage theory and the efficiency wage theory. It implies that employed workers tend to supply more effort in response to economic downturns. Thus, a negative shock to an economy has intriguing impacts...

Upon introducing heterogeneity and dynamics into a model of the demand for children, a problem of optimal population is defined and analyzed. It is shown that from the perspective of social welfare, better-educated individuals produce too few children while less-educated individuals produce too...

Much recent research on openness and productivity has shifted attention away from regions and countries to firms. Most of those studies have focused on exports and productivity. However, empirical study on the relationship between imports and productivity with firm-level data is scarce. This...

This article analyzes the impacts of child labor on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children in the spirit of Becker and Lewis. It shows that, without child labor, the quantity of children can be a normal good so that it increases with parental income under some fairly...

This paper analyses child labor and children's human capital formation in response to the changes of the relative wage-productivity between child labor and adult labor. It implies that because children's labor market participation raises the financial resources spent on their education, a small...

Drawing on the literature of occupational status and social distance, a theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid “social humiliation.” A closed-economy general equilibrium model that incorporates occupational status and examines the interaction between the...

This paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical investigation into the impact of job skill types on the black/white pay differentials. The theoretical analysis derives that the more intensively "soft"/"hard" skills are used in an occupation, the greater/smaller the black/white pay...