Early life experiences are likely to be important for the formation of preferences. Religiosity is a key dimension of preferences, affecting many economic outcomes. This paper examines the effect of college major on religiosity, and the converse effect of religiosity on college major, using...

Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to research harms teaching and thus harms students' human capital accumulation. The economics...

Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in a society can lead to greater inequality. To investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended health and living standards around the world. This article provides an interim overview of these effects, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Economists have explained how the pandemic is likely to have differential consequences...

Proprietary data for production workeis is analyzed to determine which aspects of productivity are affected by secondary schooling. The measures of productivity explored are: propensity to quit and be absent, phisical oatput per hour, and ability to perform complex tasks. The data suggests that...

Because much of the concern about youth unemployment is motivated by the large differences between the rates for blacks and whites, we have pursued our earlier work by analyzing separately for black and white youth the relationship between high school preparation and early labor force...

In this paper we use data from the Retirement History Survey (RHS) to examine the relationship of some sociodemographic and economic variables to morbidity and mortality. Since the RHS is a longitudinal survey, we are able to study current health conditioned on prior health as well as the more...

A structural model of the demand for college attendance is derived from the theory of comparative advantage and recent statistical models of self-selection and unobserved components. Estimates from NBER-Thorndike data strongly support the theory. First, expected lifetime earnings gains influence...

The educational screening hypothesis states that beyond a certain point schooling functions as a signaling device to identify pre-existing talents. We test for the presence of screening by comparing the schooling and earnings of self-employed workers and of those employed by others in a sample...

It can be claimed that education is simply a normal consumption good and that like all other normal goods, an increase in wealth will produce an increase in the amount of schooling purchased. Increased incomes are associated with higher schooling attainment as the simple result of an income...