David De La Croix is a very interesting economist. His homepage is http://homepages.econ.ucl.ac.be/d.delacroix/. As can be seen on this web-page , he has done some intuitive research into things which don´t seem so common sense. For example his model on number of children versus cost of health. As his summary says “If the cost of health decreases, parents will increase their investment in their children’s longevity. The number of children will first increase in the Malthusian regime as a consequence of higher lifetime income. As longevity rises, fertility starts falling as a result of the trade-off faced by parents between investing in their own human capital and spending time rearing children.”.
Now recently he and Matthias Doepke have come out with a paper on quality of public education and private education. The paper is highly theoretical .But a very readable summary is on this link http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/559. Basically they come out with the result that the number of private schools go up as inequality increases (like in USA,Brazil, India) and consequently the quality of education in public school drops.
