The gender wage gap varies across countries. For example, among OECD nations women in Australia, Belgium, Italy and Sweden earn 80% as much as males, whereas in Austria, Canada and Japan women earn about 60%. Current studies examining cross-country differences focus on the impact of labor market...

Current empirical growth models limit the determinants of country growth to geographic, economic, and institutional variables. This study draws on conflict variables from the Correlates of War (COW) project to ask a critical question: How do different types of conflict affect country growth...

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand how earnings are distributed across the population. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array...

This paper relaxes the assumption of homogeneous rates of return to schooling by employing nonparametric kernel regression. This approach allows us to examine the differences in rates of return to education both across and within groups. Similar to previous studies we find that on average blacks...

We derive a tractable nonlinear earnings function which we estimate separately for each individual in the NLSY79 data. These estimates yield five important parameters for each individual: three ability measures (two representing the ability to learn and one the ability to earn), a rate of skill...

This paper proposes a new strategy to identify causal effects. Instead of finding a conventional instrumental variable correlated with the treatment but not with the confounding effects, we propose an approach which employs an instrument correlated with the confounders, but which itself is not...