This paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political "fundamentals" can sustain such different systems of social insurance, fiscal redistribution, and education finance as those, of the United States and Western...

Endowment payouts have become an increasingly important component of universities' revenues in recent decades. We study how universities respond to financial shocks to endowments and thus shed light on a number of existing models of endowment behavior. Endowments actively reduce payouts relative...

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct approach, made...

This paper uses general-equilibrium simulations to explore the role of residential mobility in shaping the impact of different private-school voucher policies. The simulations are derived from a three-district model of low-, middle-, and high-income school districts (calibrated to New York data)...

Why do workers earn so much more in the United States than in India? This study compares the earnings of workers in the two countries in a unique setting. The product is perfectly tradable (software), technology differences are nil (they are members of the same work team), and the workers are...

This paper documents the pervasiveness of job polarization in 16 Western European countries over the period 1993-2010. It then develops and estimates a framework to explain job polarization using routine-biased technological change and offshoring. This model can explain much of both total job...

Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effects of hiring workers and revealing more...

By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women aected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities...