The transition from Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals has substantially shifted the policy debate from development to inclusive development. Using interactive quantile regressions, we examine the correlations between mobile banking and inclusive development (quality of growth, inequality and poverty) among individuals in 93 developing countries for the year 2011. Mob...

Peers, Neighborhoods and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the...

This paper tests the extent to which the accumulation of basic cognitive skills, as measured by a post-schooling math test, matter for young dropouts entering today’s labor market. Based on a sample of dropouts who were age 16-18 when administered a math test in the late 1990s, estimates indicate that a standard deviation increase in the test score is associated with 6.5 percent higher average ...

The Role of Childhood Health for the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital: Evidence from Administrative Data We use unique administrative German data to examine the role of childhood health for the intergenerational transmission of human capital. Specifically, we examine the extent to which a comprehensive list of health conditions – diagnosed by government physicians – can account f...

The role of human capital composition has been given importance in the most recent endogenous growth models. Assuming that primary as well as secondary education is more suitable for imitation and higher education is more appropriate for innovation, this paper empirically investigates whether the contribution of human capital to productivity growth depends on the composition of human capital an...

It is widely believed that countries with greater levels of income inequality also have lower levels of intergenerational mobility. This relationship, known as the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC), has been prominently cited by high-ranking public policy makers, best-selling authors and Nobel Prize winning academics. Yet relatively little cross-national work has empirically examined the mechanisms thou...

We analyse how progressive taxation and education subsidies affect schooling decisions when the returns to education are stochastic. We use the theory of real options to solve the problem of education choice in a dynamic stochastic model. We show that education attainment will be an increasing function of the risk associated with education. Furthermore, this result holds regardless of the degre...

we study the effect of education and its expenditures, especially in higher education, on poverty and income inequality. using the keynesian approach it is shown that education, from the theoretical point of view, lowers poverty and income inequality level. in an empirical work we, used the data including 111 observations from 91 countries, with different human development levels, and concluded...

This paper considers an optimal income tax cum higher education policy. It shows that in the presence of an optimal income tax system higher education should be taxed rather than subsidized. Furthermore, income taxes should become less progressive when an optimal higher education policy is introduced. JEL Classification: H21, I22. Berthold U. Wigger Department of Economics University of Mannhei...