The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government...

We examine whether democratic societies can escape poverty traps. Unrestricted agenda setting with simple majority rules fail to educate a society, because education-enhancing redistribution will not occur. We show that a combination of suitable constitutional rules overcomes this impossibility...

Controlled choice over public schools attempts giving parents selection options while maintaining diversity of di fferent student types. In practice, diversity constraints are often enforced by setting hard upper bounds and hard lower bounds for each student type. We demonstrate that, with hard...

The official national accounts statistics do not show the role of human capital in the national economy. A set of satellite tables supplementing the standard national accounts statistics could serve this data need. In this satellite account, expenditure on education and training are recorded as...

In this article, we discuss whether and when the risk taking and moral hazard is beneficial to the insured and to the society as well. We establish model by stochastic optimal control theory. We obtain the optimal levels of risk taking and moral hazard from perspectives of the insured and the...

We use an econometric model of fertility and children’s activities to examine the causal effects of fertility on a child’s activities taking the endogeneity of fertility into account. Our specification is nonlinear and simultaneous and uses latent factors to allow for unobserved influences...

This paper investigates how community attitudes affect school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-) schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic...

In a recent research paper, health economists David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney analyze data primarily from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual cross-sectional household survey administered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease...

This paper develops a model with increasing adult life expectancy as the driving force of the economic and demographic transition. We show that if parents invest their own time into children's human capital, rising adult life expectancy unambiguously increases fertility. With children educated...