This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

The asylum seekers who choose the level of investment in the host-country-specific human capital, and the government of the host country that chooses the probability of naturalization are modeled as optimizing economic agents in a setting not of their choosing.

The global financial crisis triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in 2008 revealed the unsustainability of China’s export-led growth regime, which supported the country’s rapid economic growth for over 20 years. Today, the Chinese economy has been forced to break...

We reevaluate the role of human capital in determining the wealth of nations. We use standard human capital theory to estimate stocks of human capital and allow the quality of human capital to vary across countries. Our model can explain differences in schooling and earnings profiles and...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? This question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value-added (VA) teachers improve students' long-term outcomes. Using school district and tax records for more...

Are teachers' impacts on students' test scores ("value-added") a good measure of their quality? One reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value-added (VA) measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers' causal impacts on student achievement. We test for bias in...

"We analyse the impact of retraining for the unemployed on future labour market success, and estimate effects separately for different target occupations. We use German registry data and apply statistical matching methods. The results show that on average, after a period with strong lock-in...

"This paper investigates the time-varying relationship between German output and employment growth, in particular their decoupling in recent years. We estimate a correlated unobserved components model that allows for both persistent and cyclical time variation in the employment impact of GDP as...

Recent microfinance crises have put into question the effectiveness of microfinance for poverty alleviation. In this context, non-financial services supplied by microfinance institutions re-emerge as a mechanism to strengthen microfinance’s effect on wellbeing through human capital formation....

We examine the extent to which tuition and needsbased aid policies explain important differences in the relationship between family income and postsecondary attendance relationships between Canada and the U.S. Using data from recent cohorts, we estimate substantially smaller attendance gaps by...