human capital inequality life expectancy and economic growth this article presents a model in which inequality affects per capita income when individuals decide to invest in education taking into account their life expectancy which depends to a large extent on the human capital of their parents our results show the existence of multiple steady states depending on the initial distribution of education the low steady state is a poverty trap in which children raised in poor families have low life expectancy and work as non educated workers the empirical evidence suggests that the life expectancy mechanism explains a major part of the relationship between inequality and human capital accumulation increases in life expectancy and human capital accumulation have accelerated since the post world war ii period in most parts of the world however in spite of the convergence in life expectancy across countries during this period see for example becker et al 2005 in 2000 there was still an immense gap between the rich and the poor world life expectancy was 78 years in oecd countries but only 47 years in sub saharan africa where the gap with rich countries is increasing nowadays due to aids being widespread likewise the striking disparities in human capital are also evident whereas the secondary school enrolment rate was almost 100 in rich countries more than 70 of children in sub saharan africa were not enrolled in secondary schooling and therefore entered the labour market as unskilled workers from childhood these disparities in schooling are also accompanied by huge differences in the distribution of education thus the human capital gini coefficient in sub saharan africa 0 56 is twice as high as that of oecd countries 0 21 in this article we argue that high human capital inequality low life expectancy and low human capital accumulation rates reinforce each other and may explain the persistence of poverty in a great part of the world

proper risk aversion on introduit et on etudie une condition comportementale significative sur les fonctions d utilite pour les richesses qui signifie qu une loterie indesirable ne peut jamais etre rendue desirable par la presence d une loterie indesirable independante

standard risk aversion this paper introduces the concept of standard risk aversion a von neumann morgenstern utility function has standard risk aversion if any risk makes a small reduction in wealth more painful in the sense of an increased reduction in expected utility also makes any undesirable independent risk more painful it is shown that given monotonicity and concavity the combination of decreasing absolute risk aversion and decreasing absolute prudence is necessary and sufficient for standard risk aversion standard risk aversion is shown to imply not only pratt and zeckhauser s proper risk aversion individually undesirable independent risks always being jointly undesirable but also that being forced to face an undesirable risk reduces the optimal investment in a risky security with and independent return similar results are established for the effect of broad class of increases in one risk on the desirability of or optimal investment in a second independent risk

world war i and the postwar depression a reinterpretation based on alternative estimates of gnp abstract this paper examines the official commerce department estimates of gross national product for 1909 1928 and suggests that they are far inferior to the less commonly used kendrick gnp estimates the paper then derives a revised version of the kendrick series that alters significantly the representation of annual movements in gnp before 1919 this endorsement of a revised kendrick gnp series in place of the official commerce department estimates before 1929 suggests that aggregate demand movements had much less effect on real output during world war i and the depression of 1921 than is commonly believed

public provision of private child goods abstract this paper analyzes the public provision of private goods for children in a politico economic model with endogenous fertility the government provides every child with goods that can also be purchased by parents in private markets and the level of provision is determined by majority rule households with many children benefit from the public provision more than those with fewer children thus a political conflict arises between them the distribution of the number of children across households which is a crucial factor for determining which group is politically dominant is endogenously determined by households fertility decision the sequential interaction between fertility and political decisions might lead to multiple equilibria equilibrium with high fertility and low private public spending ratio and equilibrium with low fertility and high private public spending ratio our model could explain the large differences in fertility and structure of child related spending across countries

inducing human capital formation migration as a substitute for subsidies abstract when productivity is fostered by an individual s own human capital as well as by the economy wide average level of human capital individuals under invest in human capital the provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital conditional on the subsidy being self financed by tax revenues can bring the economy to its socially optimal level of human capital yet a strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country by raising both the level of human capital formed by optimizing individuals in the home country and the average level of human capital of non migrants in the country can enhance welfare and nudge the economy toward the social optimum indeed under a well controlled restrictive migration policy the welfare of all workers is higher than in the absence of this policy

a brain gain with a brain drain abstract we study human capital depletion and formation in an economy open to out migration as opposed to an economy which is closed under the assumption of asymmetric information the enlarged opportunities and the associated different structure of incentives can give rise to a brain gain in conjunction with a brain drain migration by high skill members of its workforce notwithstanding the home country can end up with a higher average level of human capital per worker

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

return and dynamics the path of labor migration when workers differ in their skills and information is asymmetric an implementation of the theory of labor migration under asymmetric information shows that return migration arises from the reinstatement of informational symmetry which induces low skill workers who are no longer pooled with high skill workers to return when workers in an occupation constitute more than two skill levels say four without loss of generality the following patterns emerge migration is sequential that is it proceeds in waves each wave breaks into workers who return and workers who stay within waves the returning migrants are the low skill workers the average skill level of migrants is rising in the order of their wave excerpt

could a monetary base rule have prevented the great depression abstract this paper continues an ongoing investigation of the properties of a policy rule that specifies settings of the monetary base that are designed to keep nominal gnp growing smoothly at a noninflationary rate counterfactual historical simulations for 1923 1941 are conducted with the rule and a small model of nominal gnp determination estimated with u s quarterly data with residuals fed in as estimates of the behavioral shocks that occurred the simulation results indicate that nominal gnp would have been kept reasonably close to a steady three percent path over 1923 1941 if the rule had been in effect

economic policy and the great depression in a small open economy we use a standard new keynesian model of a small open economy extended to include a government sector to investigate the great depression in australia a calibrated model with a fixed exchange rate regime similar to the gold standard does well in replicating the dynamics of output during the interwar period we then ask to what extent shocks to the economy would have been moderated by adopting modern day policies we find that if policymakers had adopted a flexible exchange rate with a taylor rule policy that output fluctuations during the great depression would have been moderated by up to 25 changes in government fiscal policy would also have moderated output fluctuations but by a slightly smaller amount overall we find that improved policy could have reduced output fluctuations by almost 50

the dynamics of migration in the presence of chains abstract the experience of several host countries shows that small initial inflows of migrants have a perpetuating effect on further migration from the same country of origin this paper studies the interplay of factors that determine the transitional dynamics of migration flows in the presence of social relationships between migrants we fully specify and formally solve a stochastic two country model of chain migration with one sending and one receiving country in which initial immigration patterns matter for future immigration patterns numerical calculations illustrate the crucial role of the wage elasticity of labor demand in counteracting the potential explosiveness of chain migration

property rights and efficiency in olg models with endogenous fertility is there an economic rationale for pronatalist policies we propose and analyze a particular market failure that leads to inefficiently low fertility in equilibrium the friction is caused by the lack of ownership of children if parents have no claim on their children s income the private benefit from producing a child can be smaller than the social benefit we analyze an overlapping generations model with fertility choice and parental altruism ownership is modeled as a minimum constraint on transfers from parents to children using the efficiency concepts proposed in golosov jones and tertilt 2007 we find that whenever the transfer floor is binding fertility choices are inefficient second we show that the usual conditions for efficiency are not sufficient in this context third in contrast to settings with exogenous fertility a payg social security system cannot be used to implement efficient allocations to achieve an efficient outcome government transfers need to be tied to fertility choice

a banking explanation of the us velocity of money 1919 2004 the paper shows that us gdp velocity of m1 money has exhibited long cycles around a 1 25 per year upward trend during the 1919 2004 period it explains the velocity cycles through shocks constructed from a dsge model and annual time series data ingram et al 1994 model velocity is stable along the balanced growth path which features endogenous growth and decentralized banking hat produces exchange credit positive shocks to credit productivity and money supply increase velocity as money demand falls while positive goods productivity shock raises temporary output and velocity the paper explains such velocity volatility at both business cycle and long run frequencies with filtered velocity turning negative starting during the 1930s and the 1987 crashes and again around 2003 results suggest that the money and credit shocks appear to be more important for velocity during less stable times and the goods productivity shock more important during stable times

public versus private education when differential fertility matters we assess the merits of different education systems in a framework that accounts for the joint decision problem of parents regarding fertility and education specifically we compare the implications of a public and a private schooling regime for economic growth and inequality we find that private schooling leads to higher growth when there is little inequality in human capital endowments across families in contrast when inequality is high public education yields higher growth by reducing fertility differentials in addition public schooling leads to income convergence while private schooling can result in ever increasing inequality our analysis highlights theimp ortanceof accounting for endogenous fertility differentials when analyzing educational policies

looking at the population problem through the prism of heterogeneity welfare and policy analyses upon introducing heterogeneity and dynamics into a model of the demand for children a problem of optimal population is defined and analyzed it is shown that from the perspective of social welfare better educated individuals produce too few children while less educated individuals produce too many children and all individuals invest too little in the education of their children the impact of several policy tools geared at addressing the population problem is investigated in particular how child allowances and other tax subsidy policies can be harnessed to enhance welfare and how and why early childhood education programs can mitigate the population problem

international migration transfers of norms and home country fertility this paper examines the relationship between international migration and source country fertility the impact of international migration on source country fertility may have a number of causes including a transfer of destination countries fertility norms and an incentive to acquire more education it provides provide a rigorous test of the diffusion on of fertility norms using original and detailed data on migration the results provide evidence of a significant transfer of fertility norms from migrants to their country of origin a one percent decrease in the fertility norm to which migrants are exposed reduces home country fertility by about 0 3 percent for origin countries

household borrowing constraints fertility dynamics and economic growth abstract in this article we provide a model of growth with endogenous fertility in which multiple steady states derive from the modelling of household liquidity constraints we put forward an innovative approach to the finance of higher education by assuming that youths can borrow because their parents guarantee the loan repayment with their income young individuals can renege on their debt and lenders provide them credit only up to an amount which is commensurate to a collateral provided to children by their families parents care about children s education and choose a collateral which depends positively on family income and negatively on family size a stable trap of low development is characterized by high fertility rates and low investment in human capital on the other hand in economies with a sufficiently low starting rate of fertility borrowing constraints gradually vanish and the process of growth reaches a steady state characterized by the optimality of fertility and schooling choices government subsidies to education may reduce population growth and promote human capital investment if fertility at steady states is lower than thresholds

a sequential study of migration and job search this paper designs a multiarmed bandit mab sequential model for the analysis of the migration job search process the implications either are compatible with well known migration behavior or when novel are also plausible for example regions with large wage variability attract migrants and regions with large nonpecuniary returns increase both in migration and out migration a major advantage of this approach is the relative ease with which martingale estimators can be derived from the martingale structure of the model these martingale methods are exemplified for the return migration phenomenon

a general equilibrium model of guest worker migration the source country perspective abstract this paper examines the problem of guest worker migration from an economy populated by identical utility maximizing individuals with finite working lives the decision to migrate the rate of saving while abroad as well as the length of a migrant s stay in the foreign country are all viewed as part of a solution to an intertemporal optimization problem in addition to studying the microeconomic aspects of temporary migration the paper analyses the determinants of the equilibrium flow of migrants the corresponding domestic wage and the level of welfare enjoyed by a typical worker effects of an emigration tax are also investigated

are there increasing returns to the intergenerational production of human capital information on ability and achievement test scores of sibling children many of whom had mothers who continued their schooling between births is used to test the hypothesis that maternal schooling augments the production of children s human capital that there are increasing returns to human capital estimates from models that take into account heterogeneity in maternal endowments could not reject this hypothesis and suggest benefits to postponed childbearing in particular they suggest that postponement of the initiation of childbearing by two years among women who are tenth graders would result in a 5 percent increase in their children s achievement test scores

simulating the transmission of wealth inequality via bequests abstract this paper develops calibrates and simulates a dynamic 88 period olg model to study the intergenerational transmission of u s wealth inequality via bequests the model features marriage realistic fertility patterns random death assortative mating based on skills heterogeneous skill endowments heterogeneous rates of return skill inheritability progressive income taxation and resource annuitization via social security all bequests arise from imperfect annuitization nonetheless the model generates a realistic ratio of aggregate wealth to aggregate labor income a realistic bequest flow relative to the stock of wealth and a realistic wealth distribution at retirement skill differences assortative mating social security and the time preference are the primary determinants of wealth inequality bequests do propagate wealth inequality but only in the presence of social security which disproportionately disinherits the lifetime poor intergenerational wealth immobility also considered here is primarily determined by the inheritance of skills from one s parents and the magnification of the impact of this inheritance by marital sorting

equity and efficiency in human capital investment the local connection a general model of community formation and human capital accumulation with social spillovers and decentralized school funding is used to analyse the causes of economic segregation and its consequences for equity and efficiency significant polarization arises from minor differences in endowments preferences or access to capital markets this makes income inequality more persistent across generations but the same need not be true for wealth equilibrium stratification tends to be excessive resulting in low aggregate surplus whether state equalization of school resources can remedy these problems hinges on how purchased social and family inputs interact in education and in mobility decisions

a linearized version of lucas s neutrality model the model developed in robert lucas s influential expectations and the neutrality of money has not been widely used for extensions or modifications of the original analysis in part because of its difficulty of manipulation the present paper describes a linearized version that unlike other models prominent in the rational expectations literature retains the original s mainfeatures yet is comparatively easy to manipulate two examples of modifications facilitated by this linearization are included these involve an autoregressive money growth specification and the assumption of lump sum rather than proportional monetary transfers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

voting education and the great gatsby curve abstract high inequality goes hand in hand with low intergenerational earnings mobility across countries little is known about why the us is characterized by high inequality and low mobility while the opposite tends to hold for scandinavian countries in an overlapping generations model calibrated to the us education policies are endogenized via probabilistic voting by exploiting cross country variation in the bias in voter turnout towards the educated and elderly the model replicates the negative relation between inequality and public education expenditures and accounts for more than a quarter of the variation in inequality and mobility for the us i find that compulsory voting could foster mobility whereas inequality would be hardly affected

a brain gain or a brain drain migration endogenous fertility and human capital formation i introduction it is traditionally argued that openness to international migration within a developing country can cause high skilled workers to emigrate and thereby create a brain drain problem 1 however it has been demonstrated in recent studies that such openness to international migration raises the return on human capital in a developing country which in turn raises the average level of human capital in the source country 2 this article revisits this issue building on the prior studies by examining the impact of migration on economic growth through the role of human capital there are however three features that distinguish this article from the prior works first of all while most of the prior studies on migration have tended to focus solely on static models so as to simplify their analyses we develop a dynamic model of migration within which endogenous growth is generated 3 this dynamic model enables us to study the dynamic behavior of the economy and to separate the short run effects from the long run effects when there are changes in migration policy an endogenous growth model is constructed in this article to allow for the persistent growth of a source country hence we contribute to two strands of the literature international migration and the endogenous growth model we also show that under certain conditions the balanced growth path bgp may exist to the best of our knowledge this is the first article to consider the possibility of the bgp within a migration model second we endogenize the fertility choice within the model it is already widely acknowledged that fertility and education are interdependent decisions for parents indeed becker murphy and tamura 1990 developed a model to examine the way s in which the joint decisions on fertility and education affect economic growth while the linkage between growth and inequality was subsequently explored when differential fertility matters by de la croix and doepke 2003 however the studies on migration have tended to assume a constant population growth rate and have generally not taken into account fertility decisions examples include rodriguez 1975 and mountford 1997 both of which presented dynamic models to study the issues of migration and economic growth in both cases population was taken as an exogenous variable and was assumed to grow at a constant rate in this article we allow parents to make fertility and education decisions and to have an opportunity to migrate to a foreign country internalizing fertility decisions induces a trade off between the quality and the quantity of children when there are changes in migration policy this trade off will then have an effect on economic growth as a result of its direct effect on the accumulation of human capital fertility does matter when considering an economy with heterogeneous agents since it will also affect the structure of the labor force third we include the average costs involved in preparing each migrating child to overcome the various barriers when migrating to foreign countries with different backgrounds languages and cultures a static model with migration costs such as language skills preparation was developed by lien and wang 2005 in which they found that when including such costs the openness to international migration may well create a brain drain since it is quite common for the governments of developing countries to encourage their citizens to migrate to certain foreign countries the inclusion of the costs of migration allows us to study the impact of these policies we develop a migration model within which agents differ from one another based upon their different endowments of human capital considering two alternative scenarios to facilitate our examination of the effects of migration on economic performance in the first scenario we consider the case where the host country cannot differentiate between the abilities of the migrants as a result of asymmetric information between the host country and the migrants

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

the macroeconomics of child labor regulation we develop a positive theory of the adoption of child labor laws workers who compete with children in the labor market support a child labor ban unless their own working children provide a large fraction of family income fertility decisions lock agents into specific political preferences and multiple steady states can arise the introduction of child labor laws can be triggered by skill biased technological change which induces parents to choose smaller families the theory can account for the observation that in britain regulations were first introduced after a period of rising wage inequality and coincided with rapid fertility decline

to segregate or to integrate education politics and democracy how is the quality of public education affected by the presence of private schools for the rich theory and evidence suggest that the link depends crucially on the political system we develop a theory that integrates private education and fertility decisions with voting on public schooling expenditures we find that the presence of a large private education sector benefits public schools in a broad based democracy where politicians are responsive to low income families but crowds out public education spending in a society that is politically dominated by the rich the main predictions of the theory are consistent with state level data and micro data from the u s as well as cross country evidence from the programme for international student assessment study

recent developments in the theory of rules versus discretion policymaker this perspective on rules versus discretion was changed by kydland and prescott 1977 who looked at rules as a form of commitment a commitment amounts to a binding contract which specifies in advance the actions that someone will take possibly contingent on some exogenous variables that everyone can observe in contrast under discretion a person promises only to take those future actions that will best further his objectives later on such promises are easy to keep thus discretion is the special case of a rule or contract in which none of today s provisions restrict a person s future actions in the area of private business dealings it is natural to think about optimal forms of contracts which would not usually be pure discretion similarly for public policy the perspective becomes the optimal form of rules or prior restrictions even the smart benevolent policymaker is likely to desire and use

international migration imperfect information and brain drain we consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than f

how much does sorting increase inequality some commentators argue that increased sorting into internally homogeneous neighborhoods schools and marriages is radically polarizing society calibration of a formal model however suggests that the steady state standard deviation of education would increase only 1 7 percent if the correlation between neighbors education doubled and would fall only 1 6 percent if educational sorting by neighborhood disappeared the steady state standard deviation of education would grow 1 percent if the correlation between spouses education increased from 0 6 to 0 8 in fact marital and neighborhood sorting have been stable or even decreasing historically sorting has somewhat more significant effects on intergenerational mobility than on inequality

the brain drain and the world distribution of income abstract skilled emigration or brain drain from developing to developed countries is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration today such migration is likely to affect the world distribution of income both directly through the mobility of people and indirectly as the prospect of migration affects the rate of return to education in both the sending and receiving economies this migration pattern will therefore affect human capital accumulation and fertility decisions in both the sending and receiving economies this paper analyzes these effects in a dynamic two country model of the world economy where agents in both countries make optimal fertility and human capital decisions the implications of the analysis for the world distribution of income are derived in the light of recent empirical findings of the brain drain literature the analysis shows that the current trend towards predominantly skilled emigration from poor to rich countries may in the long run increase inequality in the world distribution of income as relatively poor countries grow large in terms of population in the short run however it is possible for world inequality to fall due to rises in gdp per capita in large developing economies with sufficiently low skilled emigration rates

life expectancy and the environment we present an olg model in which life expectancy and environmental quality dynamics are jointly determined agents may invest in environmental care depending on how much they expect to live in turn environmental conditions affect life expectancy as a result our model produces a positive correlation between longevity and environmental quality both in the long run and along the transition path eventually multiple equilibria may also arise some countries might be caught in a low life expectancy low environmental quality trap this outcome is consistent with stylized facts relating life expectancy and environmental performance measures we also discuss the welfare and policy implications of the inter generational externalities generated by individual choices finally we show that our results are robust to the introduction of growth dynamics based on physical or human capital accumulation c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

federalism fertility and growth this paper analyses the effect of federalism on fertility and growth in a model with human capital accumulation and endogenous fertility two regimes of education finance are compared central and local i find that local education finance yields higher growth at the price of increased inequality the effect of federalism on total and differential fertility rates depends on the elasticity of substitution between children and consumption the paper also empirically examines the relationship between fertility rates and fiscal decentralisation on a panel of oecd countries and finds a weak negative effect of decentralisation on total and differential poor minus rich fertility

inequality growth and environmental quality trade offs in a model with human capital accumulation this paper develops a simple endogenous growth model where pollution exposure and vulnerability are unequally spread across the population and growth and distribution are endogenous in this set up we investigate whether trade offs between growth distributional and environmental concerns may emerge we show that a tighter environmental policy reduces income inequality and can improve both growth and total welfare immediate welfare losses though do occur and are larger for countries that start at low levels of environmental quality e g developing countries inegalite croissance et qualite de l environnement arbitrages dans un modele d accumulation de capital humain nous developpons un modele de croissance endogene ou l exposition et la vulnerabilite a la pollution sont inegalement reparties dans la population et ou la croissance et la distribution des revenus sont determinees de facon endogene dans ce cadre d analyse nous cherchons s il existe des arbitrages entre la croissance les inegalites et l environnement notamment dans les pays en developpement nous montrons qu une politique environnementale plus stricte conduit a la fois a une reduction des inegalit es et a une augmentation de la croissance et du bien etre dans un premier temps cependant ce changement de politique conduit a une reduction du bien etre qui est relativement plus importante pour les pays dont la qualite environmentale est initiallement faible e g les pays en developpement

inequality and growth why differential fertility matters we argue that inequality and growth are linked through differential fertility and the accumulation of human capital we build an overlapping generations model in which dynasties differ in their initial endowment with human capital growth the income distribution and fertility are endogenous due to a quantiy quality tradeoff families with less human capital decide to have more children and invest less in education when initial inequality is high large fertility differentials lower the growth rate of average human capital since poor families who invest little in education make up a large fraction of the population in the next generation a calibrated model shows that this fertility differential effect is quantitatively important we also provide empirical evidence to confirm the links between inequality differential fertility and growth suggested by the model

the banking panics in the united states in the 1930s some lessons for today in this paper we discuss the lessons learned from the us banking panics in the 1930s for the response by the federal reserve to the crisis of 2008 we revisit the debate over illiquidity versus insolvency in the banking crises of the 1930s and provide empirical evidence that the banking crises largely reflected illiquidity shocks in the recent crisis the fed under bernanke had well learned the lesson from the banking panics of the 1930s of conducting expansionary monetary policy to meet demands for liquidity however unlike in the 1930s the deeper problem of the recent crisis was not illiquidity but insolvency and especially the fear of insolvency of counterparties a number of virtually insolvent us banks deemed too big and too interconnected to fail were rescued by fiscal bail outs

gender inequality endogenous cultural norms and economic development this research focuses on the role played by cultural norms in the long run persistence of gender inequalities cultural norms about gender roles are considered to be endogenous and can generate gender inequality and low development traps indeed when the gender gap is internalized it leads to inegalitarian views about gender roles due to these inegalitarian beliefs boys receive more education and the initial gender gap is reinforced the existence of gender inequality traps is pointed out by the world bank as a major obstacle for economic development wdr 2006 the present article allows for a better understanding of the persistence of such traps and the means to escape

migrants intentions to return home and capital transfers a study of tongans and samoans in australia this article examines the attributes of migrants from the pacific island states of tonga and samoa living in australia to assess the extent to which return migrants could contribute to the human and physical capital stock of the migrant sending countries it also examines the impact of intention to return on remittances and asset accumulation the study finds that very few migrants plan to return home and very little evidence that those who plan to return embody significant human capital education experience and skills intention to return may be important nevertheless since those who plan to return remit significantly more than those that do not and also accumulate far more physical capital at home than those that do not intend to return

the effects of education on fertility evidence from taiwan this study investigates the impact of women s education on fertility for identification we use the 1968 compulsory education law change in taiwan which generated a regression discontinuity design rdd setting we use the whole population of women from the 1980 and 2010 population censuses results of our rdd estimation using the exact date of birth suggest that the law change was effective in boosting women s education but it did not have any impact on fertility this is in stark contrast to most previous studies using only the birth year as the running variable or using it to construct instruments which find that women s education depresses fertility this study demonstrates that using a discrete running variable in rdd may generate a false discontinuity for an otherwise continuous regression function jel j13 c21 i2

teachers growth and convergence this paper examines the role of individual instruction and teacher quality in determining economic growth and convergence across school districts the model shows that if teacher quality is more important for human capital accumulation than individual instruction human capital convergence will occur between two school districts this convergence arises because a poor school district hires relatively better teachers but uses them in larger classes in comparison with a rich school district the model is estimated on panel data of the states of the united states from 1882 to 1990 the estimates indicate that teacher quality is relatively more important for human capital accumulation than individual instruction the model accounts for all the mean growth in state per capita incomes and between 80 and 100 percent of convergence in state per capita incomes

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

heterogeneity stratification and growth macroeconomic implications of community structure and school finance this paper examines how socioeconomic stratification and alternative systems of education finance affect inequality and growth agents interact through local public goods or externalities school funding neighborhood effects and economywide linkages complementary skills knowledge spillovers sorting families into homogeneous communities often minimizes the costs of existing heterogeneity but mixing reduces heterogeneity faster integration therefore tends to slow down growth in the short run yet raise it in the long run a move to state funding of education presents society with a similar intertemporal trade off local and global complementarities play major roles in determining the efficient social and educational structures copyright 1996 by american economic association

international migration with heterogeneous agents theory and evidence for germany 1967 2009 temporary migration though empirically relevant is often ignored in formal models this paper proposes a migration model with heterogeneous agents and persistent cross country income differentials that features temporary migration in equilibrium there exists a positive relation between the stock of migrants and the income differential while the net migration flow becomes zero consequently existing empirical migration models estimating net migration flows instead of stocks may be misspecified this suspicion appears to be confirmed by our investigation of the cointegration relationships of german migration stocks and flows since 1967 we find that i panel unit root tests reject the hypothesis that migration flows and the explanatory variables are integrated of the same order while migration stocks and the explanatory variables are all i 1 variables and ii the hypothesis of cointegration cannot be rejected for the stock model