Our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the United States Congress. We specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of Congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset. Given estimates of the structural model, we ...

In this paper we develop and implement a method for bounding the extent to which labor market discrimination can account for racial wage differentials. The method is based on a two-sided, search-matching model that formally accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and unobserved offered wages. We...

In this paper, we structurally estimate a sequential model of high school attendance and work decisions. The estimates imply that youths who drop out of high school have different traits than those who graduate, e.g., they have lower school ability and/or motivation, lower expectations about the...

This paper analyzes the relationship between age-specific fertility, mortality and real wages in Sweden during the demographic transition. We fit a model of life cycle fertility to two and a half centuries of Swedish time-series data. The model fits the data well, accurately portraying the total...