The high disparities on educational levels and opportunities are important determinants of social and economic inequalities in Brazil, which makes their investigation extremely important. Educational inequality occurs early on individuals' educational career in Brazil. It is therefore essential...

The youth population bulge is often mentioned in discussions of youth unemployment and unrest in developing countries, most recently in explaining the “Arab Spring.” But the youth share of the population has fallen rapidly in recent decades in most countries, and is projected to continue to...

Spousal characteristics such as age, height, and earnings are often used in social science research to infer social preferences. For example, a "male taller" norm has been inferred from the fact that fewer wives are taller than their husbands than would occur with random matching. The large...

Motivated by empirical evidence that fluctuations in age structure affect relative wages across age groups, this paper asks whether there is a steady-state age distribution that maximizes the lifetime wages of a representative worker. The paper proves the surprising result that in a pure labor...

Human capital models imply that both the distribution of education and returns to education affect earnings inequality. Decomposition of these 'quantity' and 'price' components have been important in understanding changes in earnings inequality in developed and developing countries. This paper...

The democratic government in South Africa has developed a system of social grants to combat the high levels of poverty and inequality inherited from the apartheid regime. With the help of modest economic growth and an associated increase in per capita household income, the introduction and...

This paper analyzes the determinants of schooling attainment at the household level for 14-years-old in urban regions of Saõ Paulo and Northeast Brazil, using data from the 1982 PNAD. We find mean schooling of 4.75 years in Saõ Paulo, and 3.25 years in the Northeast, both far short of the...