This paper studies the nature and impact of credit constraints in the market for human capital. We derive endogenous constraints from the design of government student loan programs and from the limited repayment incentives in private lending markets. These constraints imply cross-sectional...

The internal rate of return to schooling is a fundamental economic parameter that is often used to assess whether expenditure on education should be increased or decreased. This paper considers alternative approaches to estimating marginal internal rates of return for different schooling levels....

A long-standing issue in the literature on education is whether marginal returns to education fall as education rises. If the population differs in its rate of return, a closely related question is whether marginal returns to higher education fall as a greater fraction of the population enrolls....

The desegregation of Southern schools following the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision was perhaps the most important innovation in U.S. education policy in the 20th century. This paper assesses the effects of desegregation on its intended beneficiaries, black students. In Louisiana,...

This review paper, prepared for the forthcoming Russell Sage volume Changing Poverty, considers the ability of different education policies to improve the learning outcomes of low-income children in America. Disagreements on this question stem in part from different beliefs about the problems...

Parental investments as well as school quality are important determinants of children's later-life outcomes. In this paper, we shed light on what determines parental investments and study how parents perceive the returns to parental time investments, material investments and school quality, as...

Firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. “Training contracts” that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. Using plausibly exogenous contractual variation from a leading trucking firm,...

This paper considers a dynamic taxation problem when agents can allocate their time between working and investing in their human capital. Time investment in human capital, or "training," increases the wage and can interact with an agent's intrinsic, exogenous, and stochastic earnings ability. It...

Investment in water purification technologies led to large mortality declines by helping eradicate typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. This paper seeks to understand how these technologies affected human capital formation. We use typhoid fatality rates during early life as a proxy for...

Over the past 15 years, labor-quality growth has been very strong—defying nearly all earlier projections—and has added around 0.5 percentage points to an otherwise modest U.S. productivity picture. Going forward, labor quality is likely to add considerably less and may even be a drag on...