To design an optimal education policy, it is essential to account for the fertility differential between the poor and the rich because it affects the human capital investment through the child quantity-quality tradeoff of children. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium in which parents choose...

Mobility of highly-skilled workers affects and is affected by labor market conditions, taxes, and other policies. This paper documents the demographic and fiscal importance of international migration, especially in aging societies, reviews the efficiency and distributional effects of mobility,...

This paper studies the determinants of inequality in human capital with particular emphasis on the role of the credit constraints. We develop and estimate a model in which individuals are subject to uninsured human capital risks and invest in education, acquire work experience, accumulate...

The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They...

The authors investigate the desirability of income taxes when the objective is to mitigate wasteful conspicuous consumption generated by people's status-seeking behavior. They consider the joint role of pre-tax wage inequality and of social norms determining how social status is assigned. They...

We examine economic growth, inequality and education when the wellspring of growth is the formation of human capital through a combination of the quality of child-rearing and formal schooling. The existence of multiple steady states is established, including a poverty trap, wherein children work...

We consider optimal taxation in a model with wealth-poor and wealth-rich households, where wealth derives from business capital and home ownership, and investigate the consequences of a rising wealth inequality at steady state on these tax rates. The optimal tax structure includes some taxation...

This paper offers a supply-side explanation of the variation in long-run growth and inequality across countries. In the model education simultaneously affects growth and income inequality. More human capital may increase or decrease growth but also measured inequality. In contrast to some recent...