Recent research on the economics of human development deepens understanding of the origins of inequality and excellence. It draws on and contributes to personality psychology and the psychology of human development. Inequalities in family environments and investments in children are substantial....

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baselinepretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

We derive a Gaussian approximation result for the maximum of a sum of high dimensional random vectors. Specifically, we establish conditions under which the distribution of the maximum is approximated by that of the maximum of a sum of the Gaussian random vectors with the same covariance...

We develop a new direct approach to approximating suprema of general empirical processes by a sequence of suprema of Gaussian processes, without taking the route of approximating whole empirical processes in the supremum norm. We prove an abstract approximation theorem that is applicable to a...

In this work we consider series estimators for the conditional mean in light of three new ingredients: (i) sharp LLNs for matrices derived from the non-commutative Khinchin inequalities, (ii) bounds on the Lebesgue factor that controls the ratio between the L8 and L2-norms, and (iii) maximal...