Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades...

While previous research has documented how the Kalamazoo Promise, the most prominent and generous place-based college scholarship program, increased enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools, this paper qualifies and quantifies the characteristics of students who were induced to enter—or...

Recent years have seen a surge in the evidence on the impacts of active labor market programs for numerous countries. However, little evidence has been presented on the effectiveness of such programs in China. Recent economic reforms, associated massive lay-offs, and accompanying public...

Despite tremendous recent interest in the subject of student debt by both researchers and policymakers, little is known about how the distribution of college graduate debt has been evolving and what factors can explain it. We use National Postsecondary Student Aid Study data from 1990 through...

This paper examines the effect of differences in ability on the timing and number of children. Higher skilled women have less disutility of labor and have relatively less utility of raising children. Motherhood has a negative effect on the accumulation of human capital by learning-by-doing and...

This paper investigates the relation between human capital and retirement when the age of retirement is endogenous. This relation is examined in a life-cycle earnings model. An employee works full time until retirement. The worker accumulates human capital by training- on-the-job and by...