Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...

Machines increasingly replace people in routine job tasks. The remaining tasks require workers to make open-ended decisions and to have "soft" skills such as problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability. This paper documents growing demand for decision-making and explores the consequences...

Investing in college carries high returns, but comes with considerable risk. Financial products like equity contracts can mitigate this risk, yet college is typically financed through non--dischargeable, government-backed student loans. This paper argues that adverse selection has unraveled...

We develop and estimate a life-cycle model in which individuals make decisions about consumption, human capital investment, and labor supply and use it to analyze changes in Social Security rules. The most important aspect of our paper is human capital towards the end of the life cycle which...

Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census...

We created experimental variation across local markets in China in the share of firms having access to a new loan product, to measure the direct and indirect effects of access to finance. We find that: (1) Access to finance had a large positive direct effect on the performance of treated firms....

How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from a one-time relaxation of...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...