The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power...

We examine the growth performance of Sweden in the post-World War II period, focusing on explaining the relative decline of economic growth in Sweden since the early 1970's. The hypothesis that the relative decline is a consequence of productivity catch-up is rejected. A number of potential...

We examine the contribution of human capital to economy-wide technological improvements through the two channels of innovation and imitation. We develop a theoretical model showing that skilled labour has a higher growth-enhancing effect closer to the technological frontier under the reasonable...

We study how barriers to competition - such as, restrictions to business start-up and strict enforcement of covenants or IPR - affect the investment in knowledge capital when contracts are not enforceable. These barriers lower the competition for human capital and reduce the incentive to...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on the growth effects of education and social capital. The main focus is on the cross-country evidence for the OECD countries, but the paper also briefly reviews evidence from labour economics, to clarify where empirical work on education using macro...

The MRC National Survey of Health and Development provides data on the hourly pay of males and females at age 26 in 1972 and in 1977. These have been subjected to regression analysis to see how far the gap between men's and women's pay is statistically explicable by (a) a "human capital" model...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

We develop a model of human capital formation with endogenous labour supply and heterogeneous agents to explore the optimal level of education subsidies along with the optimal progressive schedule of the labour income tax and optimal capital income taxes. Subsidies on education ensure efficiency...

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and second-generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labour market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general...