We evaluate the effect of the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

The impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of local public goods and collective action in Africa remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and local primary school funding in rural western Kenya. The econometric...

Attending college seems to be a profitable and affordable investment in the US. Nevertheless, a number of academically talented young people still hesitate to attend college. This puzzle motivates this paper to test for whether college education is a risky investment. To measure the riskiness of...

This paper develops a model in which it is possible to evaluate alternatives of human capital financing. The alternative systems under discussion are: total feeing; graduates taxes and uniform taxes (this can be associated to the scheme presently used in the Argentina universitary system)....

This essay analyzes the economic causes and effects of household decisions concerning fertility, education and child labor when children can supplement family income early in life and must support their parents in old age as adults. Parents, who raise and educate children for both financial and...

We investigate the effect of institutions on efficiency of training markets. After setting up a theoretical institutional framework that shows how institutions affect efficiency, we apply this framework to the real world. An empirical analysis of institutions affecting training markets will...

In 1983 the ruling communists in the Indian state of West Bengal, with the avowed objective of making education more accessible, abolished the teaching of English at the primary level from public schools. I argue that the abolition can be looked upon as a lowering of academic standards, and that...

Recently many editors try to reduce the turnaround times of academic journals. Shorter turnaround times, however, will induce many additional submissions of low-quality papers, increasing significantly the workload of editors and referees, and the number of rejections prior to publication. I...