ABSTRACT Molecular hydrogen allows cooling in primordial gas, facilitating its collapse into Population III stars within halos. Lyman–Werner (LW) radiation from these can escape the halo and delay further star formation by destroying H2 other As cosmological simulations show that increasing background LW field strength increases average mass required for formation, we perform follow-up of selec...

The economic boom concentrated attention on skill shortages in Australia and their role in preventing the economy from reaching its full potential level of output and putting pressure on inflation. This paper concentrates on the extent to which the supply of tradespersons has adjusted to changed economic conditions and the regional dimension of these supply changes. While there is much anecdota...

In this paper we compute nutrient-expenditure elasticities for two macro nutrients (calories and protein) and five micro nutrients (calcium, thiamine, riboflavin, calcium and iron) using an all India sample of rural households for 1994. We show that in each case the respective elasticities are positive and significant. This lends support to our hypothesis that an increase in income would increa...

We study the e¤ect of culture on important economic outcomes by using the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women 30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the country of ancestry as our cultural proxies. These variables should capture, in addition to past economic...

Mental Health and Labour Market Participation: Evidence from IV Panel Data Models A large body of empirical research links mental health and labour market outcomes; however, there are few studies that effectively control for the two-way causality between work and health and the existence of unobserved individual characteristics that might jointly determine health and labour market outcomes. In ...

The majority of skill-upgrading in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s was due to within industry shifts in skill-intensity. Traditional trade theory, represented by the HeckscherOhlin model, predicts that trade affects relative employment primarily by shifting resources across industries. For this reason, many economists have concluded that international trade has played a minor rol...

Educational Self-Selection, Tasks Assignment and Rising Wage Inequality This paper presents a general equilibrium assignment model of workers to tasks with endogenous human capital formation and multidimensionality of skills. The model has 2 key features. First, skills are endogenous and multidimensional. Second, two types of assignment occur, workers self-select their education and firms assig...

When a bank grants a loan, it takes the risk that the borrower will not honor his debt. To reduce this uncertainty, banks have created instrumental evaluation methods in order to try to evaluate the risk more objectively. An analysis of financial counselors’ practices shows the limits of these methods. To obtain information needed for the financial risk evaluation and to reduce the information ...

Whatever Works: Dualisation and the Service Economy in Bismarckian Welfare States The paper compares employment structures in five Continental welfare states. These countries feature broad similarities in their reliance on a more dualised model of labour market flexibility, particularly in service occupations with low skill requirements. However, a closer look also reveals considerable differen...

Entrepreneurial activity di ers substantially across countries. While cultural di erences have often been proposed as an explanation, measuring a country's cultural characteristics su ers from various problems. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that cultural factors in uence entrepreneurial behavior by looking at di erences in self-employment rates between immigrant groups within the same m...