This paper analyzes the identifying power of weak convexity assumptions in treatment effect models with endogenous selection. The counterfactual distributions are constrained either in terms of the response function, or conditional on the realized treatment, and sharp bounds on the potential outcome distributions are derived. The methods are applied to bound the effect of education on smoking. ...

Recent papers have found that often immigrants are overqualified relative to native-born workers when comparing an individual’s education to the ‘average’ education in their occupation. We show that these results are sensitive to differences in the education distribution between immigrants and the native born. Using data for New Zealand, which has an immigration policy that favours skilled immi...

Previous analyses of population aging mainly focused on the social security implications of the aging trend. This paper addresses aging in an open economy framework with two regions that have politically responsive fiscal policy regarding education finance. Demographic shocks start an economic growth process but results are sensitive to a critical parameter in the model that indicates return to...

Education Policy and Equality of Opportunity We provide a measure of equality of educational opportunity in 54 countries, estimated as the effect of family background on student performance in two international TIMSS tests. We then show how organizational features of the education system affect equality of educational opportunity. Our model predicts that late tracking and a long pre-school cycl...

The paper develops a model for the screening mechanism for higher education, within an adverse selection framework. Specifically it examines the effect of wage earned by high school graduates on higher education participation. The model pinpoints a positive relation between the “high school” wage and the number of candidates entered in higher education with positive influences on the quality of...

Absolute Risk Aversion and the Returns to Education Individual absolute risk aversion is measured for a sample of 1373 male household heads, using the 1995 wave of the Survey on the Income and Wealth of Italian households. This measure, conditional on financial and real wealth and household income, is used as an instrument for attained education in a standard log earnings equation. I find that,...

In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub-Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to b...

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting from 1950, I show that foreigneducated individuals promote democracy in their home country, but only if the foreign education is acquired in democ...

Human Capital, Economic Growth, and Inequality in China China’s rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial investments in producing it. The egalitarian access t...

Intergenerational Education Transmission: Neighborhood Quality and/or Parents’ Involvement? We develop a model that analyzes the impact of residential neighborhood and parents’ involvement in education on children’s educational attainment and test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that the better the quality of the neighborhood, the higher the parents’ involvement in chi...