Both empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that preference heterogeneity is a necessary feature of any model that is able to account for observed heterogeneity in wealth and lifetime income and consumption profiles. Why do tastes differ across people? We propose a framework in which people...

We present a model in which the gender gap in wages displays non-monotonic dynamics of the type observed in the US during the twentieth century. We show that the dynamics of the gender gap depend on the number of women that work at home in the early stage of their life and join the labor force...

The past century has witnessed major changes in the economic choices of American women. Over the long term, there has been a marked trend towards lower fertility and higher female labor force participation. However, change did not occur in a uniform fashion: during the post-war Baby Boom,...

In most democracies, the majority of education expenditures is financed by the government. In non-democracies, we observe a wide variation in the mix of public and private funding of education. In addition, countries with high inequality tend to rely more heavily on private schooling. We develop...

We develop a model of technological progress and knowledge transmission in the Malthusian era. Given low literacy rates, codified knowledge and formal education were much less important than today. Instead, most knowledge was directly acquired from elders. In knowledge-intensive areas, this...

It takes a woman and a man to make a baby. This observation suggests that for a birth to take place, both parents should agree that they are better off with another child. In this paper, we first show empirically that agreement between the parents indeed makes a birth much more likely. We then...