We study the effect of an Iranian educational policy implemented in 2012 that restricted access to higher education for women in 30% of Iran's public universities, mostly in sciences and engineering. To analyze the effect of the policy, we use a triple difference strategy across gender, cohorts...

Two family-specific lotteries take place during conception— a social lottery that determines who our parents are and which environment we grow up in, and a genetic lottery that determines which part of their genomes our parents pass on to us. The outcomes of these lotteries create inequalities...

I offer a way out of the Taubman-Goldberger controversy on the public policy (ir)relevance of heritability studies by arguing for a quasi-experimentally controlled comparison of the estimates that these studies provide. If the environments individuals are exposed to are under such control,...

The birth order literature emphasizes the role of parental investments in explaining why firstborns have higher human capital outcomes than their laterborn siblings. We use birth order as a proxy for investments and interact it with genetic endowments. Exploiting only within-family variation in...

This paper develops new measures of the task content of occupations that are based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08). Using a detailed set of 3,264 occupation-specific tasks, we construct five measures of non-routine analytic, non-routine interactive,...

Parental entrepreneurship is a strong, probably the strongest, determinant of own entrepreneurship. We explore the origins of this intergenerational association in entrepreneurship. In particular, we identify the separate effects of pre- and post-birth factors (nature and nurture), by using a...

This paper develops new measures of the task content of occupations that are based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08). Using a detailed set of 3,264 occupation-specific tasks, we construct five measures of non-routine analytic, non-routine interactive,...