A growing proportion of the U.S. workforce will have been raised in disadvantaged environments that are associated with relatively high proportions of individuals with diminished cognitive and social skills. A cross-disciplinary examination of research in economics, developmental psychology, and...

Various arguments have been used to explain Sub-Saharan Africa's economic decline. We find that a stress on investments in education as a prerequisite for more rapid growth is misplaced; that greater openness is far from sufficient to insure economic progress; that income inequality and urban bias...

We exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on educational outcomes of their children when they are high school seniors. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a...

The rise of education has featured prominently in the debate on the sources of modern long-term economic growth. Existing accounts stress the positive role of public education and the importance of political support for its provision. We argue that such an explanation for the spread of schooling...

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education than poorer ones. Both the anomalies of education history, and its...

We use 1940 Census data to study the intergenerational transmission of human capital for children born in the 1920s and educated during an era of expanding but unequally distributed public school resources. Looking at the gains in educational attainment between parents and children, we document...

Studies of small-scale "model" early-childhood programs show that high-quality preschool can have transformative effects on human capital and economic outcomes. Evidence on the Head Start program is more mixed. Inputs and practices vary widely across Head Start centers, however, and little is...

This paper studies human capital responses to the availability of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary work authorization and deferral from deportation for undocumented, high-school-educated youth. We use a sample of young adults that migrated to...

The modern concept of the wealth of nations emerged by the early twentieth century. Capital embodied in people human capital mattered. The United States led all nations in mass postelementary education during the human-capital century.' The American system of education was shaped by New World...

This paper offers an explanation for observed differences across countries in educational policies and in resulting interpersonal distributions of human capital. We analyze a general-equilibrium model in which, as a result of the apportionment of natural ability, nurturing, and publicly financed...