This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baselinepretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

We study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. We show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience and we reason...

When productivity is fostered by an individual's own human capital as well as by the economy-wide average level of human capital, individuals under-invest in human capital. The provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital, conditional on the subsidy being self-financed by tax...

We calculate the equilibrium fraction of cooperators in a population in which payoffs accrue from playing a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. Individuals who are hardwired as cooperators or defectors are randomly matched into pairs, and cooperators are able to perfectly find out the type of a...

Quite often established migrants offer assistance and support that facilitate the arrival of new migrants. Why would migrants want other migrants to join them - so much so as to be willing to pay for them to come? We suggest a rationale. Our modeling framework is capable of explaining several...

We offer a game-theoretic proof of Hamilton's rule for the spread of altruism. For a simple case of siblings, we show that the rule can be derived as the outcome of a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game between siblings. -- evolution of altruism ; Hamilton's rule ; one-shot prisoner's dilemma game