Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This vast expressive body, studied by the corresponding discipline of folklore, has evaded the attention of economists. In this study we do four things that...

Orson Wells made Citizen Kane, his greatest movie, when he was 25 years old; Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, his most famous house, when he was 70. Contrasts as great as this raise the question of whether there is a general explanation of when in their lives great innovators are most...

Powerful currents have reshaped the structure of families over the last century. There has been (i) a dramatic drop in fertility and greater parental investment in children; (ii) a rise in married female labor-force participation; (iii) a significant decline in marriage and a rise in divorce; (iv)...

This paper studies the life-cycle impacts of a widely-emulated high-quality, intensive early childhood program with long-term follow up. The program starts early in life (at 8 weeks of age) and is evaluated by an RCT. There are multiple treatment effects which we summarize through interpretable...

We characterize the factors that determine who becomes an inventor in the United States, focusing on the role of inventive ability (“nature”) vs. environment (“nurture”). Using deidentified data on 1.2 million inventors from patent records linked to tax records, we first show that...

This paper covers a continuous and longer time period than previously possible to examine human and market capital because of research by Christian (2017). This paper focuses on the presentation and analysis of trends in human capital by gender. During 1975-2012 there were significant changes in...

This paper studies the effect of exposure to female and male “high-achievers” in high school on the long-run educational outcomes of their peers. Using data from a recent cohort of students in the United States, we identify a causal effect by exploiting quasi-random variation in the exposure...

Gender differences in the propensity to negotiate are often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean-in.” We use a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of leaning-in. Despite men and women achieving similar and positive returns when they must...

Using U.S. time diary data we construct occupation-level measures of coordinated work schedules based on the concentration of hours worked during peak hours of the day. A higher degree of coordination is associated with higher wages but also a larger gender wage gap. In the data women with...