The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term "human capital," seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The upsurge...

This paper examines argues that while two distinct perspectives characterize the foundations of the public funding of research - filling a selection gap and solving a disclosure problem - in fact both the selection choices of public funders and their criteria for disclosure and commercialization...

We link a new UK management survey covering 8,000 firms to panel data on productivity in manufacturing and services. There is a large variation in management practices, which are highly correlated with productivity, profitability and size. Uniquely, the survey collects firms' micro forecasts of...

I study how people understand, reason, and learn about tax policy. The goal is to uncover the mental models that people use to think about income and estate taxes. To that end, I run large-scale online surveys and experiments on representative U.S. samples to elicit not only respondents' factual...

In order to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, we surveyed approximately 1,500 students at one of the largest public institutions in the United States using an instrument designed to recover the causal impact of the pandemic on students' current and expected...

The threat of COVID-19 has increased the health risks of going to an office or factory, leading more workers to do their jobs remotely. In this paper, we provide results from firm surveys on both small and large businesses on the prevalence and productivity of remote work, and expectations about...

We review the efficacy of three approaches to forecasting elections: econometric models that project outcomes on the basis of the state of the economy; public opinion polls; and election betting (prediction markets). We assess the efficacy of each in light of the 2004 Australian election. This...

This article examines revealed rates of time preference for public goods, using environmental quality as the case study. A nationally representative panel-based sample of 2,914 respondents considered a series of 5 conjoint policy choices, yielding 14,570 decisions. Both the conditional fixed...

We estimate the career and location preferences of students in U.S. doctoral programs in a major STEM field - chemistry. Our analysis is based on novel survey conducted in 2017 of 1,605 current Chemistry doctoral students enrolled in the top 54 U.S. research intensive universities. First, we...

For decades, households' subjective expectations elicited via surveys have been considered meaningless because they often differ substantially from the forecasts of professionals and ex-post realizations. In sharp contrast, the literature we review shows household characteristics and the ways in...