"Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...

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...

I demonstrate that although socioeconomic differences in birth weight have always been" fairly small in the United States, they have narrowed since the beginning of this century. I argue" that maternal height, and therefore the mother's nutritional status during her growing years accounted for...

We study whether banks are riskier if managers have less liability. We focus on New England between 1867 and 1880 and consider the introduction of marital property laws that limited liability for newly wedded bankers. We find that banks with managers who married after a legal change had more...

Previous research has shown that norms around the role of women in society could help explain the gender gap in mathematics, and that these norms could be transmitted within the family. Using data from the Florida Department of Education combined with birth certificates we uncover important...

Workers' social identity affects their choice of occupation, and therefore the structure and prosperity of the aggregate economy. We study this phenomenon in a setting where work and identity are particularly intertwined: the Indian caste system. Using a new dataset that combines information on...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), this paper studies the degree to which spouses sort in the marriage market on the basis of parental wealth. We estimate a variety of models, including transition matrices, OLS and TSLS models to deal with measurement error in wealth...

We study how class size and class composition affect the academic and labor market performance of college students, two crucial policy questions given the secular increase in college enrollment. Our identification strategy relies on the random assignment of students to teaching classes. We find...

We employ a latent class model to assess the impact of Mexico's Seguro Popular ("SP") program on the number of prenatal visits in a cross-sectional sample of 4,381 women who gave birth during 2002-2005. We specify an ordered probit model to permit a pregnant woman's probability of membership in...

This paper studies the role played by caste, education and other social and economic attributes in arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We use a unique data set on individuals who placed matrimonial advertisements in a major newspaper, the responses they received, how they ranked them,...