This paper presents new empirical evidence regarding the cyclicality of skill acquisition activities. The paper studies both training and schooling episodes at the individual level using quarterly data from the NLSY79 for a period of 19 years. We find that aggregate schooling is strongly...

We embed an N-level human-capital hierarchy in a growth model and demonstrate that the hierarchical structure generates an optimal investment program with phases of stock depletion and expansion in the stocks of the various levels of humancapital. We then take the implications of the model to...

This paper presents a theoretical model in which governments regulate economic activity and individuals bypass the regulations by paying bribes to the public officials who monitor their businesses; the amount of the bribe is the subject of bargaining. The paper then introduces a policy that...

The legal and economic literatures overwhelmingly support the notion that regulatory compliance is always less in the presence of corruption. This paper departs from those literatures and shows that, whenever public officials are paid fixed wages, an increase in corruption may actually foster...

This paper utilizes data from a laboratory experiment in order to examine the advantages and disadvantages of subjective measures. Our results indicate good and bad news: subjective measures correlate highly with the variables they are designed to capture but they also systematically suffer from...

In this paper, we study whether voters are more likely to "vote out" a corrupt incumbent than to re-elect him. Specifically, we examine whether they retract their support from political candidates who they think are corrupt by looking at changes in an index of corruption perceptions between the...