The importance of investment in early childhood education (ECE) has been widely documented in the literature. Among the benefits, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, is its potential to mitigate educational inequality. However, some evidence also suggests that the positive...

Economic growth and development have improved human health in many regions, while sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind. Economic theory and the existing empirical evidence suggest that development may not generate large reductions in the leading cause of adult mortality in the region,...

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33...

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

Knowing the degree of substitutability between schooling groups is essential to understanding the role of human capital in income differences and to assessing the economic impact of such policies as schooling subsidies, immigration systems, or redistributive taxes. We derive a lower bound for...

The entry of married women into the labor force and the rise in women's relative wages are amongst the most notable economic developments of the twentieth century. The growth in these indicators was particularly pronounced in the 1970s and 1980s, but it stalled since the early 1990s, especially...

Since 1990, U.S. policymakers have worked to close gaps in academic achievement by income and race (e.g. with school finance reform and school accountability systems) even as rising income inequality and income-based residential segregation have threatened to widen them. Using estimates of the...

Recent contributions in the inequality literature have raised questions about previous research on skill-biased technical change and the managerial power of CEOs. Directly supporting our theme of prior exaggeration of the rise of inequality is new research showing that price indexes for the poor...

Prior studies have examined the relationship between macroeconomic factors and health insurance for the adult population and have evaluated changes in the composition of health insurance across the income distribution. We combine these types of analysis and examine how labor market fluctuations,...

We document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. Our analysis focuses on the U.S. but also uses data from Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and Norway. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels...