I use the experience of China’s One Child Policy to examine how fertility restrictions affect economic and social outcomes over the lifetime. The One Child Policy imposed a birth quota and heavy penalties for “out-of-plan” births. Using variation in the fertility penalties across provinces over time, I examine how fertility restrictions imposed early in the lives of individuals affected their e...

The failure or success of students at school can have important impacts on their future studies and labour market outcomes. Furthermore, school performance of the children of immigrants can inform on their adjustment or disadvantage (if any) in the country of destination. This paper examines the tertiary entrance scores of children with migrant parents (firstand second-generations Australians) ...

We are interested in why minorities are so often at a disadvantage relative to the majority. Efforts made to assimilate, and time, are two elements that work to bring minorities into line with the majority. A third element, the degree to which the majority welcomes the minority, also plays a role. We examine the consequences for assimilation and harassment of growth in the minority population, ...

This article aims at investigating the interplay between environmental quality, health and development. We consider an OLG model, where human capital dynamics depend on the current environment, through its impact on children’s school attendance. In turn, environmental quality dynamics depend on human capital, through maintenance and pollution. This two-way causality generates a co-evolution of ...

Some Remarks on the Effectiveness of Primary Education Interventions In this paper I survey the recent economics of education literature in order to identify which education policies can effectively improve the quality of primary schooling, as measured by pupil test-based achievements. Particular attention is devoted to the experience of England, a country which has made substantial investments...

This paper proposes three models of social capital and growth that incorporate different perspectives on the concept of social capital and the empirical evidence gathered to date. In these models, social capital impacts growth by assisting in the accumulation of human capital, by affecting financial development through its effects on collective trust and social norms, and by facilitating networ...

This paper studies the population dynamics of preference traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission. Parents socialize and transmit their preferences to their offspring, motivated by a form of paternalistic altruism (``imperfect empathy''). In such a setting we study the long run stationary state pattern of preferences in the population, according to various socialization mech...

Several studies have argued that learning a foreign language has the potential to increase the general cognitive ability and test scores of students. In this analysis, the Mormon missionary program is used to test whether or not students who were assigned to learn a foreign language performed better in college. The results indicate that the increase in GPA due to serving a Mormon mission is the...

Previous studies of the connection between school enrollment size and student achievement use cross-sectional econometric models and thus do not account for unobserved heterogeneity across schools. To address this concern, I utilize school-level panel data, and generate first-differences estimates of the effect of school size on achievement. Moreover, to account for the possibility that trends ...

We estimate the impact of peer gender composition on student achievement, exploiting the random assignment of Korean middle school students to single-sex schools, coeducational schools with single-sex classes, and coeducational schools with mixed-gender classes. Male students attending coeducational schools with single-sex classes perform worse than boys in mixed-gender classes, while those ass...