From the canonical model of Becker onward, models of population dynamics have been based on assumptions which fit the family structure of developed countries. The aim of this paper is to develop a framework that fits the family structure of poor countries. The building blocks of the model...

This paper focuses on the evolution of the relationship between population and economic growth from Hume to New Growth Theory. In the paper, we show that there were two main views on the subject. There were those who assumed that the relationship between fertility rates and income was positive....

This paper proposes an explanation for the decrease in social mobility that has occurred in the last two decades in a number of advanced economies, as well as for the divergence in mobility dynamics across countries. Within an intergenerational framework, we show that a two-tier higher education...

The purpose of this study is to isolate the factors influencing universities' quality. An interesting fact is that of the ten top-rated US universities, nine are private. Therefore, previous studies have claimed that there is a correlation between universities being private and their quality....

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of geography on the transition process in authoritarian political regimes, and to investigate the nature of the links between political change, economic reforms and geographic location. A simple model of transition and democratization is...

Globalization has led to a vast flow of migration of workers but also of students. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the migration of individuals encompassing decisions already at the level of education. We develop a unified brain drain model that incorporates the decisions of an...

Over the last decades, productivity in the tradable sector rose substantially, while in the non-tradable sector, output per worker has remained the same, despite a similar increase in human capital in both sectors. This paper emphasizes that duality in higher education as well as heterogeneous...

This paper sheds a new perspective on models of migration by integrating in a same structure the decisions about education and work; and by incorporating return migration with "brain waste". Brain waste is defined as the depreciation, due to migration, in the human capital acquired in the home...

This paper shows that countries with high levels of "elitism" in higher-education are the countries displaying high levels of inequality. In other words, a higher level of "elitism", i.e., large gap in quality of universities, and tight selection in top universities leads to a wider gap in wages...

Should individuals migrate before acquiring education or after? In order to analyze the optimality of the timing of migration, I develop a model of migration, which combines the two migration decisions into a unique model - decisions about where to get an education and decision about where to...