This paper examines the effect of inequality on the incentives to emigrate according to a person's education and unobservable skills (residual wage). Borjas (1987) shows that higher skilled individuals are more likely to emigrate than lower skilled individuals when the returns to skill are...

This paper examines why developed countries are monogamous while rich men throughout history have tended to practice polygyny (multiple wives). Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. This paper argues that the sources of...

This paper investigates whether the sources of income, not just the levels, determine whether an individual is monogamous. Our results support the idea that polygyny stunts development by allowing wealthy men to acquire wives rather than investing in child quality.

We examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny. Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. However, we demonstrate that higher female inequality in the...

The labor market prospects of young, unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s. Crime rates show a reverse pattern: increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s. Because young, unskilled men commit most crime, this paper seeks to establish a causal...

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, a star baseball player in the late 1980’s and 1990’s, affected the performance of his teammates by introducing...

In May 1991 fifteen thousand Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centers across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of...

Between 1954 and 1989 the seasonal variation in retail new car prices declined, while the annual percentage decline in used car prices lessened. To explain these long-term changes, this article suggests that a rise in the cost of a major model change has reduced the frequency of major model...