Since the abolition of its Apartheid regime in 1994, South Africa has launched a massive program of education, which has been financed through resources representing on average 21% of the national budget or 7% of GDP. Today, the GDP share of public spending on education is 1.3 times the average...

We experimentally investigate the distribution of children's time preferences along gender and racial lines. Black boys have significantly larger discount rates than any other demographic group. Discount rates among Black girls are comparable to rates among White girls. Although White boys...

In this paper, we examine the impact of reductions in barriers to migration on the consumption of rural households in China. We find that increased migration from rural villages leads to significant increases in consumption per capita, and that this effect is stronger for poorer households...

Growing farm size has generally been explained by technological advances that have allowed farmers to substitute capital for labor. Another possible factor in explaining recent farm size is the demographic shift: the age distribution of farmers has shifted to the right and older farmers...

Farm operators are an integral part of some rural economies. The businesses they operate often hire seasonal and full-time employees and purchase goods and services from local farm implement dealers, input suppliers, and financial institutions. Farm household spending on food, furniture and...

The objective of this paper is to analyze sources of labor productivity growth in the Kansas farm sector over the period 1993-2006 for a sample of 668 farms. The nonparametric production frontier method is used to decompose labor productivity growth into three components: (1) technological...

We use an augmented national ideas production function to examine skilled immigrants' impact on Canadian innovation at the provincial level. Empirically, this model was tested using Canadian data by province on innovation flow over an 11 year time period, where innovation flow is defined in...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/24/08.

We investigate the recently advanced theory that high-technology workers are drawn to high amenity locations and then the high-technology jobs follow the workers. Using a novel data set that tracks high-technology job growth by U.S. county, we estimate spatial parameters of the response of job...