Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality. To investigate this, we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to...

Many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in a society can lead to greater inequality. To investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition, fertility, and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to...

Why has the expansion of women’s economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question by focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

We present a simple model of sovereign debt crises in which a country chooses its optimal mix of short and long-term debt contracts subject to standard contracting frictions: the country cannot commit to repay its debts nor to a specific path of future debt issues, and contracts cannot be made...

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and...

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very dierently. The education gender gap was eliminated and married...

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman's country of...

This paper examines the interactions between household formation, inequality, and per capita income. We develop a model in which agents decide to become skilled or unskilled and form households. We show that the equilibrium sorting of spouses by skill type (their correlation in skills) is an...