Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

We predict the amount, share, and value of land dedicated to roadways within and across 316 US Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Despite the amount and value of land dedicated to roadway, our study provides the first such estimate across a broad range of metropolitan areas. Our basic...

This paper considers two problems that arise in determining the role of ability in explaining the level of and change in the rate of return to schooling. (1) Ability and schooling are so strongly dependent that it is not possible, over a wide range of variation in schooling and ability, to...

To a large degree, the expansion of student aid programs to potential college students over the past 25 years in the United States has been based on the presumption that borrowing constraints present an obstacle to obtaining a college education. Economists and sociologists studying schooling...

In this paper we provide an analytical review of previous estimates of the rate of return on schooling investments and measure how these estimates vary by country, over time, and by estimation method. We find evidence reporting (or file drawer') bias in the estimates and, after due account is...

Average schooling in US states is highly correlated with state wage levels, even after controlling for the direct effect of schooling on individual wages. We use an instrumental variables strategy to determine whether this relationship is driven by social returns to education. The instrumentals...

The distribution of job satisfaction widened across cohorts of young men in the United States between 1978 and 1988, and between 1978 and 1996, in ways correlated with changing wage inequality. Satisfaction among workers in upper earnings quantiles rose relative to that of workers in lower...

This paper examines the impact of the iconic Perry Preschool Project on the children and siblings of the original participants. The children of treated participants have fewer school suspensions, higher levels of education and employment, and lower levels of participation in crime, compared with...

We present new evidence of the correlation of height with important socioeconomic outcomes, finding the height profile is significantly non linear at mean height, especially for males. We trace this non linearity back to the adult height profiles of cognitive scores from the teenage and...

What was the return to education in the United States at mid-century? In 1940, the correlation between years of schooling and earnings was relatively low, less than it had been in 1915 or than it would be in later decades. In this paper, we estimate the causal return to schooling in 1940,...