The Trade-off between Fertility and Education: Evidence from before the Demographic Transition The trade-off between child quantity and education is a crucial ingredient of unified growth models that explain the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern growth. We present first evidence that such a trade-off indeed existed before the demographic transition, exploiting a unique census-base...

This lecture offers thoughts on some issues concerning the effective development of the European space of higher education currently being pushed by the twin forces of the Bologna process and the Lisbon declaration of the EU. It is pointed out that the USA example is a good reference point but cannot be imitated mechanically, given the more segmented reality of Europe. It is noted that the Euro...

Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier lunches af...

This paper explores factors that contribute to growth in undergraduate knowledge of economics. An endogenous growth empirical model was applied to estimate students’ knowledge growth. Sources of knowledge growth were extracted to identify each factor’s contribution. Analysis indicated that in-classroom factors (instructional skill and attendance) accounted for over 50% of knowledge growth. A co...

Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program’s effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lastin...

Under the send-down policy (1968–1978) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, more than 16 million youths were forced to move to rural areas and carry out hard manual labor. This study analyzes the long-term impact of such an experience on income when these youths reached 40–55 years of age. Sent-down males were significantly more likely to upgrade their education after the Cultural Revolution...

This paper addresses the implications of transitory changes in labor market conditions for low versus high educated workers on the decision to acquire education. To identify this effect, I use the improvement in labor market prospects of low educated workers motivated by the increases in construction employment and wages during the recent housing boom. The estimation strategy is based on the fa...

The Political Economy of Social Exclusion with Implications for Immigration Policy Minorities, such as ethnic and immigration groups, have often been subject to exclusion through labor market discrimination, residential and employment segregation policies, business ownership regulations, restrictions on political participation, access to public services and more. This paper studies the dynamics...

Armed Conflict and Schooling: Evidence from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide To examine the impact of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide on children’s schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group’s baseline schooling and exploits variation across provinces in the intensity of ...

The causal relationship between educational investments and student outcomes continues to attract attention. The majority of studies have examined the effectiveness of public school expenditures or private school attendance on student outcomes. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the effectiveness of an unexplored dimension of educational inputs—private tutoring expenditures o...