This paper analyzes the effects of assignment to a one-year college preparatory program on academic performance in college. To measure the value added from pre-college programs, we use a large dataset of United States Naval Academy students from the 1988 to 2018 graduating classes, of which a...

Theory suggests that groups historically subject to discrimination, such as Jews, could exhibit traditionally high investment in education because discrimination spurred exit facilitated by human capital. Theory moreover suggests that if exit is uncertain, it could induce investment in skill...

This paper estimates wage losses arising due to changes in the structure of demand for occupations. The data on occupational changes made for the sake of adjustment to the changes in the demand structure come from the German reunification of 1990. Endogenous occupational changes are instrumented...

This study complements existing literature on the relationship between HIV/AIDS and human capital by introducing previously unexplored indicators as well as more robust empirical strategies. The overarching purpose is to assess whether previous findings on the relationship withstand empirical...

An emerging economic literature over the past decade has made use of international tests of educational achievement to analyze the determinants and impacts of cognitive skills. The cross-country comparative approach provides a number of unique advantages over national studies: It can exploit...

Against the backdrop of Baumol's model of unbalanced growth, a recent strand of literature has presented models that manage to reconcile structural change with Kaldor's stylized fact of the relative constancy of per-capita GDP growth. Another strand of literature goes beyond this, arguing that...

Working memory capacity is a key component of executive functioning and is thought to play an important role for a wide range of cognitive and noncognitive skills such as fluid intelligence, math, reading, the inhibition of pre-potent impulses or more general self-regulation abilities. Because...

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...