This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

This paper considers the sources of skill formation in a modern economy and emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills in producing economic and social success and the importance of both formal academic institutions and families and firms as sources of learning. Skill...

This paper considers the sources of skill formation in a modern economy and emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills in producing economic and social success and the importance of both formal academic institutions and families and firms as sources of learning. Skill...

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures...

This paper examines the correlated random coefficient model. It extends the analysis of Swamy (1971, 1974), who pioneered the uncorrelated random coefficient model in economics. We develop the properties of the correlated random coefficient model and derive a new representation of the variance...

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 baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper formulates a structural dynamic programming model of preschool investment choices of altruistic parents and then empirically estimates the structural parameters of the model using the NLSY79 data. The paper finds that preschool investment significantly boosts cognitive and...

In an earlier paper, we showed that integrated individual accounts, allowing individuals to borrow against future pensions when they are unemployed, can be welfare increasing, because it allows increased inter-temporal consumption smoothing without attenuating incentives to search. Here, we...