"Most empirical analyses of human capital have concentrated solely on the quantity of schooling attained by individuals, ignoring quality differences. This focus contrasts sharply with policy considerations that almost exclusively consider school quality issues. This paper presents basic...

Emerging market economies, which have much of their growth ahead of them, either run or should run persistent current account deficits in order to smooth consumption intertemporally. The counterpart of these deficits is their dependence on capital inflows, which can suddenly stop. We make two...

We propose a framework for understanding recurrent historical episodes of vigorous economic expansion accompanied by extreme asset valuations, as exhibited by the U.S. in the 1990s. We interpret this phenomenon as a high-valuation equilibrium with a low effective cost of capital based on...