This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

Using the quasi-random assignment of 760,000 children in U.S. military families, we show that neighborhood attributes experienced during childhood have powerful impacts on SAT scores, college-going and earnings. For earnings and college going outcomes, location during high school is twice as...