This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders,...

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....

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 baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

"The goal of scientific work is to understand more and more by less and less. In this effort, theoretical unification plays a large part. There are two main types of theoretical unification -- unification of different theories of the same field of phenomena and unification of theories of...

"This paper presents a new framework for analyzing inequality that moves beyond the anonymity postulate. We estimate the determinants of sectoral choice and the joint distributions of outcomes across sectors. We determine which components of realized earnings variability are due to uncertainty...

"This paper describes procedures for measuring and estimating the fundamental quantities in the study of distributive justice. We examine a variety of methods for measuring the actual reward and the just reward, for both self and other, including direct and indirect methods for measuring the...

"Recent work on social status led to derivation of a new continuous distribution based on the exponential. The new variate, termed the ring(2)-exponential, in turn leads to derivation of two closely-related new families of continuous distributions, which we call the mirror-exponential and the...

"This paper examines the properties of instrumental variables (IV) applied to models with essential heterogeneity, that is, models where responses to interventions are heterogeneous and agents adopt treatments (participate in programs) with at least partial knowledge of their idiosyncratic...