The paper contains a thorough review of explanations for the weak British growth performance of the 1950s through the 1970s and an assessment of the long-term implications of the 1980s attempt to escape from relative decline. The analysis draws on recent work in growth theory and places...

Economists long have argued that the severe sex imbalance that exists in many developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses plausibly exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total...

Over the last two centuries, many countries experienced regime transitions toward democracy. We document this democratic transition over a long time horizon. We use historical time series of income, education and democracy levels from 1870 to 2000 to explore the economic factors associated with...

We present a tractable stochastic endogenous growth model that explains how social capital influences economic development. In our model, social capital increases citizens' awareness of government activity. Hence, it alleviates the electoral incentives to under-invest in education, whose returns...

To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...

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...

This paper investigates the human capital investments of migrants whose duration in the host country is limited, either by contract or by their own choice. The first part of the paper develops a model, distinguishing between migrants who immigrate on a fixed contract, and migrants who choose...

Two of the earliest inventions of a human capital-intensive technology were for the production of personal internal goods that enabled humans to derive more pleasure out of leisure, namely dance and music. I model the incentives to invent hobbies and to acquire hobby skills, and its implications...

Lucas' 1988 model of the external effects of human capital formation is used as a starting point for an analysis of the impact of human capital on wages. Most empirical tests of new growth theory are based on time-series and cross-section data. This paper suggests a microeconometric approach to...

We investigate two dimensions of investment in general human capital on-the-job: the number of workers trained and the intensity of training for each worker. In the benchmark case, we consider wage and training decisions made by firms in an imperfectly competitive labour market. The benchmark...