As an alternative to traditional academic schooling, vocational schooling in South Africa may serve as a safety valve for students encountering difficulty in the transition from school to work. Yet if ineffective, vocational schooling could also be a sinkhole, offering little chance for success...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We...

It is widely argued that declining fertility slows the pace of economic growth in industrialized countries through its negative effect on labor supply. There are, however, theoretical arguments suggesting that the effect of falling fertility on effective labor supply can be offset by associated...

Lead pollution is consistently linked to cognitive and behavioral impairments, yet little is known about the benefits of public health interventions for children exposed to lead. This paper estimates the long-term impacts of early-life interventions (e.g. lead remediation, nutritional...

Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and poses negative externalities to health services. Its increase in recent decades can be traced back to unhealthy habits acquired in the household. We investigate whether parental beliefs play a role by eliciting beliefs about...

Higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production, particularly in the developing world. We introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age. Using data on test scores and schooling from rural India, we show that...

We analyze the tradeoff between child quantity and quality in developing countries by estimating the effect of family size on child education in urban Philippines. To isolate exogenous changes in family size, we exploit a policy shock: in the late 1990s, the mayor of Manila enacted a municipal...

The changes in women and men's work lives have been considerable in recent decades. Yet much of the recent research on gender differences in employment and earnings has been of a more snapshot nature rather than taking a longer comparative look at evolving patterns. In this paper, we use 50...

Using microdata from the 1960-2000 decennial censuses, this paper explores how large initial differences in immigrant earnings by country of origin change with duration in the United States. One analysis reveals that country of origin adds less to the explanation of earnings, among working-age...