Does lifecycle human capital accumulation vary across countries? If so, why? This paper seeks to answer these questions by studying U.S. immigrants, who come from a wide variety of countries but work in a common labor market. We document that returns to potential experience among U.S. immigrants...

This paper constructs quality adjusted labor inputs for 50 countries, disaggregated into 7 school levels. Our estimates of labor qualities are based on the wages of immigrants observed in 11 host countries. Based on these estimated labor inputs, we address two questions. First, we estimate the...

We document for nine countries ranging from rich (Canada, U.S.) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are higher in non–agriculture than in agriculture. We measure sectoral human capital and find that it accounts for the entire wage gap in the U.S. and most of the wage gaps...

We study a class of continuous time heterogeneous agent models with idiosyncratic shocks and incomplete markets. This class can be boiled down to a system of two coupled partial differential equations: a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation and a Kolmogorov Forward equation, a system that Lasry and...

In this paper we assess the role of human capital misallocation in explaining cross-country income differences. To do so we build a model of human capital accumulation by heterogeneous families that differ along two dimensions: learning ability of the children and income of the parents....

This study investigates the extent to which pre-existing social (civic) capital interacts with village elections in determining government provision of local public goods. We collect a unique survey to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral...