This paper presents new evidence on the social returns to education within a macroeconomic growth regression framework. I use improved schooling data and a macro version of the Mincer relationship between education and wages for individual workers. The results suggest that an increase by one...

This paper investigates the average impact of government debt on per-capita GDP growth in twelve euro area countries over a period of about 40 years starting in 1970. It finds a non-linear impact of debt on growth with a turning point—beyond which the government debt-to-GDP ratio has a...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...

We explore a view of the crisis as a shock to investor sentiment that led to the collapse of a bubble or pyramid scheme in financial markets. We embed this view in a standard model of the financial accelerator and explore its empirical and policy implications. In particular, we show how the...

This paper investigates inter-industry wage differentials in Belgium, taking advantage of access to a unique matched employer-employee data set covering all the years from 1999 to 2005. Findings show the existence of large wage differentials among workers with the same observed characteristics...

We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and...

We study taxable wealth in unique Swedish administrative data, annually following a large sample of households over a period of almost 40 years. The main data limitation is non-observability of wealth for those below the tax exemption level. This implies that much of the focus of the paper is on...

This paper analyses the existence of an immigrant/native wealth gap by using household survey data for Luxembourg, Germany and Italy. The results show that, in all three countries, a sizeable wealth gap exists between natives and immigrants. Towards the upper tail of the wealth distribution the...