Educational attainment varies greatly across countries and within countries over time. This paper asks whether the variation in education is primarily due to structural change or to within industry skill upgrading. The main finding is that within industry variation accounts for at least 2/3 of...

Numerous public policies are aimed at improving the earnings opportunities for children of the poor and at reducing lifetime earnings inequality. This paper investigates to what extent such policies accomplish their objectives. A quantitative theory of intergenerational mobility and lifetime...

This paper investigates how explicitly modeling the intergenerational transmission of human capital modifies the effects of tax policies obtained from standard life-cycle models. The main finding is that the intergenerational persistence of human capital is not an important determinant of the...

A large empirical literature investigates the link between "openness" and growth. Cross-country observations suggest that (i) "openness" enhances growth by increasing a country's rate of investment, and (ii) variables related to equipment investment are robustly and strongly correlated with...

The US experienced two dramatic changes in the structure of education in a fifty year period. The first was a large expansion of educational attainment; the second, an increase in test score gaps between college bound and non-college bound students. We study the impact of these two trends on the...

This paper estimates the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. Motivated by the fact that nearly half of all college students fail to earn a bachelor’s degree, we study a model of risky college completion. The central idea is that students drop out of college mainly because...

This paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross-country income differences. It exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human-capital endowments. These estimates suggest that human and...

Since 1950, U.S. educational attainment has increased substantially. While the median student in 1950 dropped out of high school, the median student today attends some college. In an environment with ability heterogeneity and positive sorting between ability and school tenure, the expansion of...