This paper analyzes how the implicit difference in time horizons between refugees and economic immigrants affects subsequent human capital investments and wage assimilation. The analysis uses the 1980/1990 Integrated Public Use Samples of the Census to study labor market outcomes of immigrants...

Researchers claim that children growing up away from their biological parents may be at a disadvantage and have lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment and uses household and child fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity...

The paper analyzes the effect of human-capital investments of heterogeneous individuals on the dynamics of the wage structure within a neoclassical growth model. The accumulation of physical capital changes relative factor prices and thus incentives to acquire skills, thereby altering the...

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect...

We develop a model of education where individuals face educational risk. Successfully entering the skilled labor sector depends on individual effort in education and public resources, but educational risk still causes (income) inequality. We show that an optimal public policy consists of...

In this model of education, where individuals are exposed both to educational risk and to wage risk within the skilled sector, successful graduation depends both on individual effort to study and on public resources. We show that insuring the present risks is a dichotomic task: Wage risk is...

In a model with ex-ante homogenous households, earnings risk and a general earnings function, we derive the optimal linear labor tax rate and optimal linear education subsidies. The optimal income tax trades off social insurance against incentives to work and to invest in human capital....

This paper quantifies the long-run impact of exposure to youth minimum wages and sheds light on its mechanisms. It uses remarkable longitudinal data spanning for twenty years and explores legislative changes that define groups of teenagers exposed for different durations. After controlling for...

Using the first two waves of the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, we investigate how a father's temporary absence affects children left behind in terms of their school attendance, household expenditures on education, and nonhousework labor supply in the 1990s. The estimating subsample is...

We analyze whether a redistributive government should provide ex ante insurance against unfortunate outcomes or whether it should instead rely on transfers for redistributing income ex post. To this end, we develop a model of education in which individuals face educational risk and wage...