We estimate a structural dynamic programming model of schooling decisions with unobserved heterogeneity in school ability and market ability on a sample taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Both the instantaneous utility of attending school and the wage regression...

We estimate a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions in which the degree of risk aversion can be inferred from schooling decisions. In our model, individuals are heterogeneous with respect to school and market abilities but homogeneous with respect to the degree of risk aversion. We...

When types of workers are imperfect substitutes, the Mincerian rate of return to human capital is negatively related to the supply of human capital. We work out a simple model for the joint evolution of output and wage dispersion. We estimate this model using cross-country panel data on GDP and...

Using a dynamic skill accumulation model of schooling and labor supply with learning-by-doing, we decompose early life-cycle wage growth of U.S. white males into four main sources: education, hours worked, cognitive skills (AFQT scores) and unobserved heterogeneity, and evaluate the effect of...

While the employment effects of minimum wages are usually reported to be small (suggesting low substitutability between skill types), direct estimates suggest a much larger degree of substitutability. This paper argues that this paradox is largely due to a bias induced by the aggregation of...

Using a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions, we investigate the relationship between subjective discount rates and the labor market ability (the discount rate bias) on a panel taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Given household human capital and Armed Forces...