Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

This study contains evidence on the importance of chronic disease burden on human-capital and fertility decisions in developing regions. The episode analyzed is the eradication of hookworm disease in the American South (c. 1910). In previous work (Bleakley 2002), it was shown that the hookworm...

This paper analyzes the impact of juvenile arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration on an individual's propensity to graduate high school before the age of 20. The analysis is conducted using data from the NLSY97. I control for a large set of observable characteristics, including...

American students work less than East Asian students in high school, but work more in college. We propose an explanation for this puzzle, using a two-stage-signaling model. Signaling can occur over time both in high school and college. We show that main signaling stage may be high school or...

This paper considers the analysis of data from randomized trials which offer a sequence of interventions and suffer from a variety of problems in implementation. In experiments that provide treatment in multiple periods (T1), subjects have up to 2^{T}-1 counterfactual outcomes to be estimated to...

In this paper, we show that when the government is able to transfer wealth between generations, regressive policies are no longer optimal. The optimal educational policy can be decentralized through appropriate Pigouvian taxes and credit provision, is not regressive, and provides equality of...

The empirical literature developed to evaluate the voucher system in Chile faced, up until late 1999, methodological and/or data limitations. Since then, the literature has used individual data and introduced a correction for selection bias. However, the treatment parameters do not take into...