The paper looks at the link between human capital and regional economic performance in the EU. Using indicators of educational stock, the matching of educational supply and labour demand, and migration extracted from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), it identifies that the economic performance of European regions over the last few years is generally associated with differences in human capital endowment. However, and in contrast to previous studies, the results highlight that factors such as the matching of educational supply and local labour needs, job satisfaction, and migration may have a stronger connection to economic performance than the traditional measures of educational stock.

In this paper we investigate the determinants of regret of study program for tertiary education graduates in Spain and the Netherlands. These two countries differ in their educational system in terms of the tracking structure in their secondary education and the strength of their education-labor market linkages in tertiary education. Therefore, by comparing Spain and the Netherlands, we aim at learning about the consequences that the two educational systems might have on the regret of study program in tertiary education. Basing on the psychological literature on regret, we derive some expectations on the determinants of regret of study program. Results reveal that, both education track and education-labor mismatch of tertiary education, are important determinants of the likelihood of program regret. Results allow us to derive some policy recommendations on the tertiary education system.

Students who have to retake courses at university are often not only low achieving, but also unmotivated and lacking in self-confidence. In this study, we present the first report of a teaching strategy based on the implementation of the flipped classroom model, team-based learning, and frequent testing strategies in groups of students retaking a subject. A sample of seven groups of an average of 68 students followed the new teaching approach. The groups are distributed across four subjects and three semesters. By comparing the average performance across groups that apply different teaching strategies -traditional versus innovative -we find a significant increase in the academic performance of the students following the new approach.

We develop a growth model where knowledge is embodied in individuals and diffused across sectors through labor mobility. The existence of labor mobility costs constrains mobility and thus generates labor misallocation. Different levels of labor misallocation imply different levels of exploitation of available knowledge and therefore different total factor productivity across countries. We derive a positive relationship between growth and labor mobility, which is consistent with the empirical evidence, by assuming aggregate constant returns to capital. We also analyze the short-and long-run effects of labor mobility costs in the case of decreasing returns to capital. It turns out that changes in mobility costs have larger economic effects when different types of workers have small rather than large complementarities. Finally, we show that different labor income taxes or labor market tightness imply different rates of labor mobility and therefore can explain differences in Gross Domestic Product across countries.