We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...

Like active labour market programmes (ALPMs), grade repetition could generate two types of effects. Better/worse outcomes due to programme participation (i.e. the fact that pupils repeat a particular grade). This is what the existing literature on grade repetition has focused on. Another...

This paper evaluates the effects of grade retention on attainment by exploiting a reform introduced in 2001 in the French-Speaking Community of Belgium whereby the possibility of grade retention in grade 7 was reintroduced. It uses the Synthetic Control Method to identify the best possible...

Should access to higher education remain ‘free’ ? Theoretical answers to this question are at least twofold. First, public higher education is said to be regressive as a priviliged minority profits from extra human capital, and all the private benefits it generates, while the general public...

There are many arguments supporting greater private contribution to higher education costs, particularly in Europe. But this case largely rests on the capability to offer deferred, income-contingent payments and to pool the cost of income contingency among all graduates. The two first features...

Roemer s’ 1998 seminal work on equality of opportunity has contributed to the emergence of a theory of justice that is modern, conceptually clear and easy to mobilize in policy design. In this paper, we apply Roemer’s theory to education policy. We first analyze the reallocations of...

This paper is a theoretical exercise aimed at developing an economic analysis of an education system in which the educational output - apart from each individual's propensity to invest in himself or the level of per-pupil spending - is heavily conditioned by the way non-monetary inputs (peer...

There are many economic and philosophical arguments supporting the introduction of student loans as a way to complement public financing and secure adequate resources for higher education, particularly in Europe. These arguments are briefly reviewed in this paper. But the case in favour of...