This paper estimates the return to an elite university education over a college graduate's career using the CHIP 2013 data. We find a substantial premium for graduating from an elite Chinese university at job entry, but it declines quickly with labor market experience. This pattern is entirely...

How do elites mobilize commoners to participate in a war? How does war mobilization affect elite power after the war? We argue that these two questions are interconnected, as elites mobilize war often because war benefits them. We demonstrate these relationships using the setting of the...

Most analysis of how the distribution of political power affects the patterns of growth has been confined to the late-twentieth century. One problem associated with a focus on the modern record is that processes that take place over the long run are not examined. We may all agree that...

This paper begins the task of explaining why the American business elite has remained white, male and mostly native-born Protestants for a century, as verified in a previous paper (Temin, 1997). I argue that the evidence is inconsistent with the hypotheses that the stability is due to...

This paper replicates a classic study of the American business elite. The older study done a half-century ago, reported the composition of business leaders a century ago. I have" drawn a sample of business leaders today to discover how much the composition of the" American business elite has...

The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean's interest list, and...

Using College and Beyond data and a variant on Dale and Krueger's (2002) matched-applicant approach, this paper revisits the question of how attending an elite college affects later-life outcomes. We expand the scope along two dimensions: we examine new outcomes related to labor force...

Before the middle of the nineteenth century most laws enacted in the United States were special bills that granted favors to specific individuals, groups, or localities. This fundamentally inegalitarian system provided political elites with important tools that they could use to reward...