1. Editorial: Consequences of Social Transformation for Economic Theory -- 2. A Survey on Business Cycles: History, Theory and Empirical Findings -- 3. Implementation of the Evolutionary-Genetic Methodology in the Mechanisms of Synthesis of Economic Theory -- 4. Synthesis of Mainstream and...

We analyze the impact of access to piped water on human capital formation as measured by test scores from standardized school exams at Brasilian primary schools. We find a positive and significant effect of around 11 percent of the standard deviation of mean test scores. The effect of piped...

"This volume consists of eight chapters, selected from papers presented at the Symposium on Human Capital and Health Behavior, organized by the Centre for Health Economics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, May 19-20, 2016"--page xi

While there is a big literature on the benefits of pre-school education, only little is known why kindergarten attendance improves later-life outcomes. This is partly because most studies analyze the effect of complete 2 years pre-school programs. In order to shed light into the black box of...

We analyze whether the frequent use of credit lines is rational or influenced by behavioral traits of households. We consider the special case of Germany where credit lines on current accounts are available to 80% of the population. We document that the excessive usage of costly credit lines is...

This paper estimates sibling correlations in cognitive skills and non-cognitive skills to evaluate the importance of family background for skill formation. The study is based on a large representative German dataset, which includes IQ test scores and measures of personality (locus of control,...