In this paper, we examine the wage returns to an extra year of primary school using a policy reform in Egypt, which reduced compulsory primary schooling from 6 to 5 years. Since this policy changed the duration of primary school while providing the same diploma, we can estimate the human capital...

We use the expansion of access to girls’ or mixed schools in Jordan as a natural experiment to investigate the effects of access to school on women’s education and fertility. We find that having access to a sex-appropriate school in a woman’s sub-district of birth during or prior to her...

How much work is ‘‘too much’’ for children aged 10-14 in Egypt? Our narrow focus here is on ‘‘work that does not interfere with school attendance.’’ For girls, work includes time spent in household chores and subsistence activities. We estimate simultaneous hours of work and...

This paper presents a comparative study of private returns to schooling of urban men in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey using similar survey data and a uniform methodology. We employ three surveys for each country that span nearly two decades, from the 1980s to 2006, and, to increase the comparability...

This paper examines the economic origins of the Islamic revival that took place in Egypt in the 1970-80s, and in Muslim societies more generally. We provide the first systematic evidence of a decline in social mobility among educated youth in Egypt. Developing a behavioral model of religion, we...

Among residents of an informal housing area in Cairo, we examine how dictator giving varies by the social distance between subjects - friend versus stranger - and by the anonymity of the dictator. While giving to strangers is high under anonymity, we find - consistent with Leider et al. (2009) -...

Deutschland übernimmt zum 1. Januar 2007 für sechs Monate die EU-Ratspräsidentschaft und zugleich für ein Jahr den Vorsitz in der Gruppe der G-8 Staaten. Gerade durch das zeitliche Zusammenfallen beider Aufgaben kann Deutschland einen Beitrag zur richtungsweisenden Gestaltung der...

Syrien steht mitten in einem wirtschaftlichen Reformprozess. Dieser ist notwendig, da die Ölreserven zur Neige gehen, wodurch die Leistungsbilanz stark negativ geworden ist. Gleichzeitig ist die Unterbeschäftigung hoch und das Pro-Kopf-Einkommen stagniert. Subventionen und Zahl der...

Bereits in den 50er Jahren begann Ägypten sein Bildungssystem auszuweiten. Folglich konnte das Land über die letzten Jahrzehnte einen erheblichen Bildungsanstieg verzeichnen. Haushaltsdaten zeigen außerdem, dass auch Kinder aus Familien mit niedrigem Bildungsstand von den Investitionen im...