This paper examines the extent to which intergenerational links through transfers of wealth and investment in human capital might help in accounting for the wealth inequality observed in U.S. data. We examine an overlapping-generations heterogeneous agents economy with idiosyncratic risk and...

We study the structure of optimal wedges and wealth taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with endogenous skills. Human capital is a private state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we assume that human capital investment is a)...

College attainment differs nearly two-fold across U.S. states. This paper shows that highly educated states employ skill-biased technologies, specialize in skill-intensive industries, but do not pay lower skill premia. A theory based on agglomeration economies is developed to account for these...

Barriers to trade lead to significant distortions in domestic prices and cause an inefficient allocation of resources across sectors. An expected outcome of a trade reform is a significant sectoral reallocation of labor in the economy. The amount and speed of the reallocation, however, will also...

his paper presents formal models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on child development. The goal is to provide theoretical frameworks for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next generation of...

We develop a lifecycle human capital investment model in an overlapping generations environment. Investments in human capital can be made at different ages and are subject to different constraints on the individual and family. We explore empirical evidence on the complementarity of investments...

In this paper we explicitly model and estimate an education system that produces human capital. An important innovation is that technological change in the production functions associated with any level of education is permitted and the rate of change may be different at different levels and for...

This paper characterizes the dynamics of Pareto efficient income taxes in a dynamic economy with human capital accumulation. I extend the tools and insights developed by Mirrlees (1971) into a dynamic framework. I follow Diamond (1998) by assuming that there are no income effects on labor...

Analyzing a variety of cross-national and sub-national data sources, we show that high adult mortality reduces economic growth by shortening time horizons. Higher adult mortality is associated with increased levels of risky behavior, higher fertility and lower investment in physical and human...