This paper attempts to contrast the traditional view of there being a fundamental trade-off between productive efficiency (and/or growth) and social equality against the current knowledge on these matters as mediated by theoretical and empirical analyses reported in the more recent literature of...

The belief that both the behavior and outcomes of students are affected by their peers is important in shaping education policy. I analyze two polar education systems -tracking and mixing- and propose several criteria for their comparison. I find that tracking is the system that maximizes...

This paper shows that reverse discrimination policies can find a justification purely on efficiency grounds. We study the optimal provision of education when households belong to different groups, differing in the distribution of the potential to benefit from education among individuals, which...

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The...

The belief that peers' characteristics influence the behavior and outcomes of students in school has been important in shaping public policy. How peers affect individuals depends on the educational system prevailing. I analyze two different systems: tracking and mixing, and I propose several...

This paper uses a very simple example (two goods, linear symmetric demand and cost) to study the effects of the price cap regulatory mechanism. We show that if a given price vector is preferred (using current welfare as the criterion) to another, then it is not necessarily the case that it is...

This essay argues how the structure of higher education in Colombia is a reflection of a dependent organizational political contract with tenuous advances on independence. Therefore, its implementation requires higher cost in terms of political transaction compared with a contract of...