This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility--the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources motivated by economic theory that account for differences in life-cycle trajectories, and uncertainty about future income. We identify the effects of...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility--the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources (income and wealth) motivated by economic theory that account for generational differences in life-cycle trajectories, uncertainty, and credit constraints....

We develop and estimate a life-cycle model in a rational addiction framework where youth choose to smoke, attend school, work part-time, and consume while facing borrowing constraints. The model features multiple channels for studying the reciprocal causal effects of addiction and education....

We study whether student-advisor gender and race composition matters for publication productivity of Ph.D. students in South Africa. We consider all Ph.D. students in STEM graduating between 2000 and 2014, after the recent systematic introduction of doctoral programs in this country. We...

This paper presents a new approach to measuring the intergenerational transmission of well-being and a novel perspective on which measures and what age ranges to use to estimate intergenerational social mobility. We select the measures and the age ranges that best predict important human capital...

The Perry Preschool Project, the longest-running experimental study of an early childhood education program, demonstrates how such interventions can yield long-term personal, societal, and intergenerational benefits for disadvantaged populations. The evidence is clear: investments in...

This paper reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills|personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in...

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and...