How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...

Using a model of wage determination developed by Stevens (2003) we offer an explanation of why tenure has a negative effect when entered in job satisfaction equations. If job satisfaction measures match quality, then the explanation follows from a model of the labour market in which workers...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that inherited human capital is a powerful vector of inequality formation and persistence, irrespective of its links with financial wealth endowment. This paper argues that the agents who inherit a low level of human capital bear a greater utility cost...

We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and inequality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the longrun economic performance of a panel of emerging countries....

We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

When the production of high quality goods needs the employment of qualified labour, firms’ decisions concerning quality are affected by the extent to which skills are abundant. By means of a comparison between monopoly and perfect competition, we show how market power in such a context may...

This paper provides theoretical foundations to the contemporaneous increase in computer usage, human capital and multi-tasking observed in many OECD countries during the 1990s. The links between work organization, technology and human capital is modelled by establishing the conditions under...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investmentdecisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wageinequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. Thesedifferent trends are the...