In this paper, we examine the general equilibrium implications of human capital accumulation in the presence of superstar markets, in which small differences in skill translate into huge differences in earnings. Previous research has concentrated on the microeconomic wage implications of...

In many economic contexts, especially signaling and search models, agents care about the distribution of other agents around them. Because of this, firms arise which produce neither goods nor services, but local “ponds†of agents. Such firms derive their attractiveness through the...

In this paper we build on the Cunha, Heckman and Navarro (2005) and show that labor earnings risk has increased considerably over time and it has increased more for lower skill groups than higher skill groups

Competitive public and private institutions of higher education in the U.S. take race into consideration in admissions and decisions about financial aid when able to do so. In public universities in states that have proscribed use of race, substitute policies, intended to promote minority...

In most democracies, the majority of education expenditures is financed by the government. In non-democracies, we observe a wide variation in the mix of public and private funding of education. In addition, countries with high inequality tend to rely more heavily on private schooling. We develop...

The transition from economic stagnation to sustained growth is often modelled with a "population-induced" technical progress which raised the return to human capital. In this literature the effect of population on productivity is assumed instead of being derived from more primary assumptions,...

This appendix of our paper, "Demographic Change, Human Capital and Welfare", contains further material that could not be included in the paper due to space limitations. It is organized as follows. Section A contains the formal equilibrium definition. Section B provides more results on the fit of...

Social contacts help workers to find jobs, but those jobs need not be in the occupations where workers are most productive. Hence social contacts can generate mismatch between a worker's occupational choice and his comparative productive advantage. Thus economies with dense social networks can...

This paper compares the sources of wage growth of young workers in two countries with very different labor market institutions, the United States and Germany. It identifies the return to general human capital accumulation, and provides a lower and upper bound to wage growth due to firm-specific...

This paper suggests a solution to the puzzling finding documented in Moskowitz and Vissing-Jorgensen (2002) that the return to an index of private equity is equal to the return to the CRSP index of public equity even though investment in private firms is substantially riskier. It presents an...