This paper proposes a new kind of asymmetric GARCH where the conditional variance obeys two different regimes with a smooth transition function. In one formulation, the conditional variance reacts differently to negative and positive shocks while in a second formulation, small and big shocks...

This paper proposes a new kind of asymmetric GARCh where the conditional variance obeys two different regimes with a smooth transition function. In one formulation, the conditional variance reacts differently to negative and positive shocks while in a second formulation, small and big shocks...

We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

When educational policy is supplemented by a redistributive income tax, and when individualsdiffer in their ability to benefit from education, the optimal policy is typically rather regressive.Resources are concentrated on the most able individuals in order to get a "cake" as big aspossible to...

The famous Mincer equation regressing log earnings on years of schooling is derived from a linear human capital accumulation equation at the individual level. Even if the cross-sectional Mincer equation holds at the level of individuals, it does not hold at the macro level of countries because...

Aging of the population will affect the growth path of all countries. To assess the historical and future importance of this claim we use two popular approaches and evaluate their merits and disadvantages by confronting them to Swedish data. We first simulate an endogenous growth model with...

The budget of a university essentially depends on the number of students it enrols. In multi-department universities resources created in one department may be redistributed to other departments. This redistribution affects the way academics share their working time between research and teaching...

We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...