Human capital accumulation is one of the main engines of economic growth. Thus, many LDCs have introduced laws over the past 30 years for compulsory education and have increased their investment in public schooling. Nevertheless, the level of education in most poor countries is still very low,...

High welfare dependency and poverty rate among lone mothers prompted a workfare reform of the Norwegian welfare system for lone parents: activity requirements were brought in, time limits imposed and benefit levels raised. To evaluate the reform we introduce an estimator that, unlike the much...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and simple selection. Researchers trying to control for unobserved ability have found conflicting results: in most cases, they have found a...

Paths to adulthood have changed greatly in the last decades: entries into the labour market as well as into partnership or parenthood have been postponed, with also new sequences and interconnections. In this piece of work we observe life-courses from the ages of 14 to 35 of men and women born...

More educated parents are observed to have better educated children. From a policy point of view, however, it is important to distinguish between causation and selection. Previous research trying to control for unobserved heterogeneity has found conflicting results: in most cases, a strong...

This paper estimates the rule governing the intra-household resource allocation between the husband and the wife representing children’s interests using 1996 data for the African society of Djibouti. In the Horn of Africa the consumption of qat (a substance similar to amphetamine) is an...

We examine the effects of di¤erences in social capital on first and second best transfers to families with children, in an asym- metric information context where the number of births, and the future earning capacity of each child that is born, are random variables. The probability that a couple...

In this paper, I attempt to explain a number of facts, adverse to women, without assuming that the latter are discriminated against in the labour market, that mothers love children more fathers, or that parents treat sons better than daughters. Nor do I assume that individual behaviour is...