This paper studies how private equity buyouts create value in higher education, a sector with opaque product quality and intense government subsidy. With novel data on 88 private equity deals involving 994 schools, we show that buyouts lead to higher tuition and per-student debt. Exploiting loan...

This study combines the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances data and the Fiscal Analyzer, a highly detailed life-cycle consumption-smoothing program, to a) measure ultimate economic inequality – inequality in lifetime spending power – within cohorts, b) assess fiscal...

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the...

It is argued that changes in workers' budget sets cannot explain the dramatic increases in" civilian work in the U.S. during World War II. Although money wages grew during the period wartime after-tax real wages were lower than either before or after the war. Evidence from the" 1940's also...

The U.S. corporate governance system has recently been heavily criticized, largely as a result of failures at Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and some other prominent companies. Those failures and criticisms, in turn, have served as catalysts for legislative change (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) and...

U.S. companies are often criticized for being overly short-term oriented. This paper documents that those criticisms have a long history, going back at least thirty-five years. The paper then considers the implications of sustained short-termism for corporate profits, venture capital investments...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...