This paper investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic behavior. We use a Swedish longitudinal dataset that links information from a large survey on children's time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades. Our...

We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained....

How schooling affects cognitive skills is a fundamental question for studies of human capital and labor markets. While scores on cognitive ability tests are positively associated with schooling, it has proven difficult to ascertain whether this relationship is causal. Moreover, the effect of...

We examine the work experiences during middle school and high school of U.S. females and males and find that most of the child-oriented work such as babysitting and camp counseling is done by females. If the type of work undertaken while young affects either development of specific human capital...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization – that is, rising employment in the...

This paper aims at disentangling the role played by different explanations on the urban wage premium along the wage distribution. We analyze the wage dynamics of migrants from lower to higher density areas in Italy, using quantile regressions and individual data. The results show that unskilled...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents learn by doing. We derive a condition under which contracts are fully incentive compatible. A closed-form solution is obtained when agents have CARA utility. It shows that human capital accumulation...

Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we document and explore three alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap: occupational sorting, human capital differences, and discrimination. We find lesbian women earn more than their heterosexual counterparts irrespective of marital...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the largely ignored issue of the determinants of the educational attainment of adults by immigrant generation. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data, differences in educational attainment are analyzed by immigrant generation...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer’s seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining...