Colleges and universities display substantial differences in the ratio of students to faculty across fields or disciplines. At Harvard University, for example, economics has about 16 students majoring in the subject per full-time-teaching equivalent, while in other departments such as astronomy,...

This paper considers whether empirical evidence exists that is consistent with the view of income redistribution as human capital insurance. If parents can invest in their children with schooling and bequests, but the returns to schooling are risky because diversification is limited, then, in...

How much of the rise in women's labor supply associated with divorce can be attributed to observable changes in the wife's environment? Such changes include a reduction in nonwage family income, a rise in her after-tax wage rate, changes in the number of children present, and a reduction in...

This article estimates the dollar amount of public higher education subsidies received by U.S. youth and examines the distribution of subsidies and the taxes that finance them across parental and student income levels. Although youths from high-income families obtain more benefit from higher...

Hours constraints are typically identified by worker responses to questions asking whether they would prefer a job with more hours and more pay or fewer hours and less pay. Because jobs with different hours but the same rate of pay may be infeasible when there are fixed costs of employment or...

Despite some empirical evidence to the contrary, government subsidy to higher education is usually presumed to be inequitable because college-educated workers earn more than less educated workers. Using a simple model of edu- cational choice with endogenous wages and two worker types, I obtain...