This paper formulates and estimates an open-economy overlapping generation general-equilibrium model of endogenous heterogeneous human capital in the form of schooling and on-the-job training. Physical capital accumulation is also analyzed. We use the model to explain rising wage inequality in...

This paper uses the Blanchard (1985) finite horizon model to study how taxes and government spending can be managed to stabilize aggregate demand. It is shown that tax policy cannot stabilize demand in less time than it stabilizes the public debt, but that, if government spending is the...

This paper traces the evolution of macroeconomic events and ideas from the late 1940s to the present day. After a brief introduction that highlights the unique features of the main macroeconomic variables as compared to their behavior before 1947, the paper turns to an analysis of four main...

This paper provides a critique of the DSGE models that have come to dominate macroeconomics during the past quarter-century. It argues that at the heart of the failure were the wrong microfoundations, which failed to incorporate key aspects of economic behavior, e.g. incorporating insights from...

We evaluate multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries -- the conditional cash transfer (CCT) -- with a student level randomization that allows us to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. We test three treatments: a basic CCT...

Under waivers to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, the federal government required states to identify schools where targeted subgroups of students have the lowest achievement and to implement reforms in these “Focus Schools.” In this study, we examine the Focus School reforms in the state...

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education granted states the opportunity to apply for waivers from the core requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In exchange, states implemented systems of differentiated accountability in which they identified and intervened in their lowest-performing...

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have been shown to increase human capital investments, but their standard features make them expensive. We use a large randomized experiment in Morocco to estimate an alternative government-run program, a "labeled cash transfer" (LCT): a small cash transfer made...